Self-Punishment as Guilt Evasion: The Case of Harry Guntrip. By Donald L. Carveth, pp.  56-76.

Carveth introduces his topic with a brief review of how guilt evasion in contemporary culture at large is mirrored by guilt evasion in many of our psychoanalytic theories of the past thirty years. Working from a view of the current “culture of narcissism,” he argues that in such a paranoid-schizoid position, guilt is avoided through either grandiosity or self-punishment (in the devalued state), which serves as a defense against a specific, true guilt based on concern for the other. It is just such a self-punishing defense against true guilt that Carveth argues is evident in the life and theories of Harry Guntrip.

Carveth describes Guntrip's recurrent illness as actually a form of “hysterical and psychosomatic self-torment for the phantasy crime of having killed his brother” (p. 60), noting that today it might be diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome or a type of depression. This is in sharp contrast to Guntrip's belief that his symptoms were attempts to “get his cold mother to mother him” (p. 60). Carveth's thesis is that Guntrip could not tolerate true guilt, and that he had to “deaden himself” in a defensive fashion and in identification with his dead brother, a form of “talion punishment” (p. 65). Carveth leads us through various