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Guilt: A contemporary Introduction by Donald L. Carveth is a short, concise, intriguing, and thought-provoking publication. The first chapter, although titled “Guilt,” really opens up the true intention of the book, which is to propose a general critique of the theory of the superego while introducing a separate form of moral conscience that inhabits the ego (as something quite separate to the superego) as well as to expand Freud’s classical notion of guilt to include the Kleinian distinction between persecutory guilt (connected to the paranoid-squizoid position) and depressive/reparative guilt (connected to the depressive position). While mentioning and describing other types of guilt, these are the central forms of guilt that will be developed throughout the book. There is a fourth underlying theme of the book which, while not mentioned in this first chapter, seems to center on a debate with both Freud and Bion on moral thought versus moral feeling.
The second chapter is central to Carveth’s thesis. Here, as in chapter four, he proposes that the development of an ego-based conscience has been long overlooked by most psychoanalytic models, having been influenced by Freud’s proposed model of the superego as the sole seat of the conscience. While intriguing, I find it difficult to sustain this reading of Freud since at the time he introduces the structural model, the classic statement of making the unconscious conscious would naturally include the unconscious content of the superego, which would then become part of the ego and fall under the rule of secondary processes. This would constitutionally entail that the ego has the intrinsic capacity to function as conscience, which means that in the Freudian model the superego is not exclusively entitled to that task. But whether the author’s reading of Freud is correct or not, the clarification is important, since
explicitly placing the conscience function of the ego in its central and deserved place has been long overd