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Heinz Kohut (1977) characterized the classical view of man as motivated by the satisfaction of his drives, dominated by the pleasure principle, and bound up in inner conflict. He called him Guilty Man. In contrast, he portrayed the self psychological view of man as motivated by a need to fulfill and express his nuclear program and complete the development of his aims and ideals. Ultimately, in Kohut's view, man's failures dwarf his successes and he falls into “guiltless despair” (p. 238) over never having realized the basic pattern of his nuclear self. This despair is a result of having been tragically deprived of the requisite responsiveness that would have enabled him to achieve his aims. Therefore, Kohut named him Tragic Man. It is our thesis, however, that Tragic Man may also feel guilty. Our purpose in this chapter is to examine the concept of guilt and its place within self psychology.
In the spirit of George Klein (1976) in his groundbreaking paper, Freud's Two Theories of Sexuality, we perform a “theorectomy” (Stolorow, 1976) on the concept of guilt in the treatment of patients with self disorders by stripping away its metapsychological garb and proposing a clinical theory of guilt. Klein asserted that metapsychology positions subjective experience within an impersonal, mechanistic, biologically based system involving forces, energies, and structures. Clinical