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Donald L. Carveth Karnac Books, London, 2013, 360 pp., paper, $49.95, ISBN-13: 978-1780491684
Donald Carveth opens The Still Small Voice with a discussion of the fact that what was once regarded by Freud as “the preferred field of work for psychoanalysis,” namely “[t]he problems which the unconscious sense of guilt has opened up, its connections with morality, education, crime and delinquency …” (Freud, 1933, p. 61), has largely come to be neglected in psychoanalytic theory, replaced by a preoccupation with issues such as shame, narcissism, self-relatedness, and intersubjectivity. Such a trend – which is the result of the residual filtering through of wider social changes, as well as dynamics peculiar to the psychoanalytic tradition itself – has, Carveth contends, robbed psychoanalysis of its central focus and contributed to the blunting of its personal and social efficacy, something which he naturally laments. Drawing heavily on the work of Eli Sagan, Carveth seeks to bring guilt back to the center of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and, at the same time, to provide psychoanalysis with a re-worked and clarified account of its own purpose and goal.
Carveth approaches his task firstly through an attempt to draw out and clarify the fundamentally moral basis of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Obscured by an apparent moral neutrality, Carveth identifies behind the injunctions to “know thyself” and to “replace id with ego” a clear moral imperative: first of all, to transcend impulsive action and, instead, develop ego strength, prudence, discretion, and rational self-mastery; but also, and more importantly, to transcend narcissism in favor of object love, and to bind with and transcend Thanatos in a movement towards Eros. In drawing out this underlying concern with moving from narcissism to object love and from Thanatos to Eros, Carveth shows clearly that psychoanalysis is not merely driven by the demand for self-knowledge or the replacement of illusion with truth. What