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Herman Westerink, a professor of Practical Theology and Psychology of Religion at the Protestant Theological Faculty in Vienna, has written a provocative study on the role of guilt in Freud's work. While few with even a glancing familiarity with Freud would be surprised at Westerink's contention that the sense of guilt is central to Freud's thinking, A Dark Trace argues that we have scarcely recognized how central it is. Westerink maintains that Freud's abiding and fervent interest in guilt spanned his entire career, not only the later work, and motivated some of his most perplexing theoretical gambits. Because the sense of guilt has not received its due in scholarly or clinical assessments of Freud's contributions, Westerink suggests, certain Freudian insights and principles - most notably, the Oedipus complex - have been given disproportionate weight, with the result that Freud appears to be more of a systematizer than he ever was. The debates in which Freud engaged with such of his former followers as Rank, Jung and Klein were to some degree related to their different conceptions of the nature and origin of the sense of guilt. Westerink resituates Freud's thinking in the context of a broad swath of intellectual conversations that were taking place in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, conversations dominated by questions of guilt, morality, conscience and punishment. Recovering a Freud responsive to poets, playwrights, novelists, anthropologists, theologians, and philosophers, as well as one who contrived to guard and stretch his thinking to protect it from the encroaching theories of rival psychoanalysts, Westerink challenges us to read Freud afresh, instead of merely rereading him.
A Dark Trace doubles as an intellectual biography of Freud. Westerink charts Freud's development as a thinker by putting close readings of his texts back in dialogue with their cultural and historical contexts, beginning with his earliest days as a researcher in Vienna. E