Guilt and the arc of the moral universe

Abstract

In May 2020, in the midst of our Covid plague, as I sheltered in place in front of my television screen, I observed the televised murder of a black man by a white policeman charged with serving and protecting the public. I could not believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. Of course, I had been cognizant of the injustices that seemed intrinsic to the status quo, but in my day to day existence I tended to dismiss them with a “yes, but…” Yet something in the experience of watching George Floyd being murdered by “the law” on national television broke through, and left me with an “Oh my God, what have we done” reaction to not only what we were doing to African Americans, but what the “American we” had done to the native Americans who had lived here for thousands of years before us.

Over the past few years the word “woke” has achieved currency as an awareness of a crack in the American myth of liberty and justice for all and the recognition that our country was built on a foundation of racism that remains embedded in our structure. Of late, the term has become invested (some might say infected) with the intense affects stirred up by the culture wars that characterize contemporary American life. As a psychoanalyst, I love the term. The idea of achieving awareness of something that had heretofore been out of reach reminds me of another word, insight, that's been part of our psychoanalytic culture from its earliest days. Insight can help us make sense of our inner lives and give shape to the way we live them. Similarly, “wokeness” can help us make sense of our history and holds the potential to shape it according to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Of course that requires us to face our demons, the painful truth of our origins as perpetrators of slavery and genocide, and the ways in which we perpetuate racial “othering” in our society. It's a perfect word to describe the experience I had watching the horror of the George Floyd murder.

The “I” who speaks through this paper is a Jewish American male born in the post World War 2 baby boom, looking backwards and forward at the universe with a sense of heightened awareness.

For me, the most painful aspect of this awakening has been the guilt that comes with recognizing the degree to which I've benefitted from a status quo that pulls like an undertow, away from the pole of justice toward the other side of the moral universe.

When I first encountered the line “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality,” (attributed to Dante, but actually a paraphrase from the mouth of John F. Kennedy) I thought that “crisis” referred to external events. But now I began to think of “moral crisis” as a state of mind. It's an awareness of the gap between who one is and who one aspires to be. In much of our day to day life, this gap is out of our awareness. Otherwise, it would be hard to go on.

Now that some light had forced its way in, I wondered what to do with the guilt I was feeling and how long it would be before I turned the light off. I began to wonder how my own moral psychology reflected processes in our society at large. That, I think, is how I decided to write this paper.

In the process of writing, I learned that in my own attempt to turn rumination into productive thinking I was grappling with the psychological problem of being what social theorist Michael Rothberg (2019) calls an “implicated subject,” who cannot escape responsibility for engaging with the iniquities that have provided me with so many benefits. My ideas occur in the context of current work being done by relational psychoanalysts who are attempting to provide a bridge between the social/ethical position of the “implicated subject” and the psychological position of relational analysts with respect to the inevitability of enactments and the search for ways to create spaces for repair. I will have more to say about this later, but want to highlight at the outset the excellent volume of essays assembled by Kabasakalkian-Mckay and David Mark (2022). While I do not consider myself a member of the “relational school,” the expansion of understanding and possibility by relational analysts (Jessica Benjamin in particular) has obvious relevance to my own explorations in this paper.

Despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary, I do believe there is something about being human that inclines us toward wanting to be better people. The existence of a moral compass extends far back into our prehistory (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021, pp 208–209), shaping and shaped by the psychological experience particular to one's own particular lifetime.

Consider these words from a sermon delivered by abolitionist minister Theodore Parker in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

In 1968, Parker's words were incorporated by Martin Luther King, Jr. into a speech entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Years later, Barack Obama, America's first black president, had them sewn into his oval office rug after achieving the highest office in the land.

Yet for every movement in the direction of justice, the arc has indeed reversed itself. The war for justice that followed Parker's remarks within a decade was followed by retrograde movement as the South turned to Jim Crow laws within another decade. Within a week of echoing Parker's remarks, King was assassinated. Barack Obama's promise of hope and change was followed by a sharp turn toward nativist forces that have shaped our current political landscape in ways eerily and frighteningly reminiscent of pre -World War II Germany.

Too often, these days, I get an eerie feeling that I'm looking at the world through the eyes of my grandparents. On both sides of my family, they watched their Eastern European world devolving into chaos and made the leap into what they hoped would be a better life in a better place for themselves, their children, and further down the line, me. At such times I say to myself “so this is what it must have been like for them. This is history repeating itself.”

The idea that history repeats itself is one that keeps repeating itself, despite academic and philosophical arguments about whether this is a “seems” or “is” situation. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that events of the past few years have led to more than a few of us sharing the same feeling that, as Faulkner put it, “the past is never dead-it's not even past.” Read a novel, watch a play, listen to a podcast-it's there. Again.

I have wondered to what an extent this feeling is just part of getting old and revisiting my own repetitions, including those that extend across generations. I am, after all, at the age and stage of life previously occupied by my grandfather when I came into the world. Psychoanalysis teaches us that we share more than genes with those who preceded us. I suspect he's taken up residence somewhere in my inner object world, in the manner that the anxieties and values of one generation get transmitted to the next.

Repetition is very much at the heart of our psychoanalytic thinking about our way of being in the world as individuals. It comes quite naturally to me, then, as a psychoanalytic student of my own life and the lives of others, to wonder about how to apply what I've learned about my own psychology and what I've learned from my patients (including what they've been able to teach me about my own psychology) to try to understand the way in which I'm watching the historical world unfold around me.

I recognize that the manner in which we as individuals make history and history makes us seems well beyond the scope of the empirical science that is the gold standard for truth in contemporary academia. Freud himself has been widely criticized for his social-anthropological works on that very basis. But at the same time, denying what we see and what we feel in deference to social norms and community conventions creates a whole different set of problems that we as psychoanalysts are quite familiar with, and I would rather err on the side of the scale that privileges saying what one sees.

After all, history is the story of human activity across time. To the extent that the collective historic consequences of human activity follows from human choices, behaviors, and the pain inherent in living, it seems worthwhile to give some thought to the way in which societal repetition might relate to the kind of repetition that psychoanalysts are familiar with in individuals. Our psychoanalytic constructs about the ways in which we, living our particular lives, can get trapped in our character structure can just as readily be applied to the way that we, as a species, can get trapped in our way of engaging with the world. To what extent is it our stars and to what extent, ourselves?

The Greeks wrestled with this question and came up with the theatrical form known as tragedy and the notion of a “tragic flaw,” the crack in our character that prevents us from fulfilling our aspirations. The experience of witnessing the tragic elements of life on stage has the potential to provide an unsettling recognition of a humanity we share. What Oedipus discovered about himself during the plague afflicting Thebes rings a bell that we can hear today.

In the moral universe, the space between who we are and who we think we should be typically occupied by an admixture of Guilt and Shame. These dysphoric affects can grow to symptomatic proportions, and they are a feature of many, if not most, clinical mental illnesses. Psychoanalytic treatment grew out of efforts to help suffering patients wake up to the role that their internal “cracks” played in the genesis of their symptoms.

Early on, psychoanalysts became aware of how we manage our internal contradictions through the ways of being that we think of as “Character Structure.” The traditional Greek wisdom that “Character is destiny” (Heraclitus) found an easy translation into the clinical ambition for “structural change” as a way of opening up possibilities for patients who seemed trapped in character structures that held them back.

What we call “Character” in individuals has its societal analogue in what is commonly referred to as the “Status Quo.” The nature of the status quo is evident to anyone who has tried to initiate social change. It's the sum total of all forces that oppose change, the set point around which a society has coalesced in order to provide a degree of stability that is necessary for day to day life to go on.

Just as children require stable families to grow up, we as members of society depend on predictability and stability to make our way in the world we inhabit during our lifetimes. The problem is that for the most part stability and social justice seem to be at odds with each other. Another way of putting it is that the status quo typically depends on some having more status than others in a world of haves and have nots.

One implication of this state of affairs is that to successfully take one's place in society as an adult requires, to some degree, that we accept it. In fact, acceptance of this situation might be said to define social maturity. That is, one price of adulthood is the moral compromise that seems necessary for social stability.

The moral contradictions that are so painfully visible from the vantage point of youth tend to become less problematic as we become immersed in the attempt to build careers and raise families within the structures that we encounter during our lifetimes. What appears to be hypocrisy from the vantage point of adolescence becomes, in adulthood, “accepting reality,” the “yes, but” upon which a stable society rests. In this way, many of us are socialized to become “Implicated Subjects.”

The psychoanalytic concept that best translates to “yes, but” is what Freud called “Disavowal.” Freud used the term to describe the way we protect ourselves from potentially traumatic external perceptions (in contrast to “repression,” which refers to the banishment of unacceptable internally generated thoughts and feelings). In a comprehensive review, Basch (1983, p. 135) characterizes it thus: disavowal is “a defense available when the need to preserve the reality-testing function comes into conflict with the perception of a significant environmental reality that is potentially traumatic. Unable to simply turn away, a compromise is formed that attempts to serve both the pleasure and the reality principle. This is accomplished by bringing about an ego split, one arm of which acknowledges the reality, while the other repudiates the meaning of the perception and substitutes a fantasy that protects the individual from the anxiety he would otherwise have to face. Disavowal»» defends against anxiety-provoking external perceptions and is the counterpart of repression, repression being directed toward similar demands from the inner world of the instincts. Disavowal is a ubiquitous process whose presence is not in itself indicative of pathology, general or specific.”

It's always struck me as notable that Freud wrote one of his main articles (Splitting of the Ego; Freud, 1938) about this way of not knowing in 1938, as the Nazi danger at his doorstep became impossible to overlook without the kind of psychological sleight of hand that a “yes-but” provides. Indeed, one of the haunting and relevant questions posed by the Holocaust has been, how did the majority of Germans live with what was happening in their midst? After all, Dachau is but a short 10 miles away from Berlin. How could there be any decency in a society that could close its eyes to such horrors? How is it that large groups of intelligent people will disregard what they don't want to see?

But, as mentioned above, we are living in a world that seems eerily reminiscent of a world in which the worst human possibilities are possible. It's not like we don't know better. It's more like, we don't KNOW better. It's easy to disavow.

Basch (1983, p. 145) points our that disavowal protects us from having to act or feel in response to what we can't allow ourselves to perceive should we let in the light: “Clinically speaking, ««disavowal»» involves the separation of personal meaning from some perceived aspect of external reality judged to be potentially anxiety provoking. Although the term ‘meaning’ has multiple referents, in psychoanalysis when we speak of the meaning of a percept we use the term to refer to the dispositional power that percept has for us, that is, what it will cause us potentially to think or do. As the clinical examples previously given show, what has happened in ««disavowal»» is that the affect that we, in view of that particular person's background and circumstances, would expect to be mobilized is not in evidence.”

Without perceiving injustice, we can't bend the arc in the direction we claim to favor. But if we acknowledge the injustices we enable through our disavowal, we take a major psychological risk. Extrapolating from my own personal experience, and from the psychological stories that have emerged in so many psychoanalytic depth treatments, I can't but wonder that the risk involves assuming the burden of an overwhelming sense of societal guilt.

Here I believe we can learn something from classical psychoanalytic theory. Guilt occupied a central position in Freud thought throughout his life. This centrality of guilt to Freudian psychology is understandable given Freud's Jewish background and Judaism's emphasis on moral laws, sin and divine punishment. Guilt played a major role in his earliest formulations about the mental maladies of his time, which he called the “defense neuroses.”

Freud's ideas about the contribution of guilt to the dynamics and their origins of mental illness found metaphoric expression in the story of Oedipus (which no doubt reflected what the ancient Greeks had already found about our human nature). Oedipus Rex is the story of a man waking up to his moral complicity in bringing about a plague that has afflicted his community. In his efforts to heal the community, Oedipus learns that the plague has been sent by the gods as a punishment for a murderous transgression. His pursuit of the criminal leads him to himself. It is too much to see, and he blinds himself as an act of punishment.

Freud's ideas about guilt and the destructive aspects of human nature came to fruition at a time in his life when his own experience of living and the world he was living in provided close acquaintance with the human potential for destructiveness toward self and others.

Let's pause here to look at the arc of the moral universe as played out in Freud's life and thought. Like myself and my cohort in the post WWII baby boom generation, he had been born into a period of relative progress and optimism. Austria had recently opened her doors to Jewish emigres who welcomed the opportunity to become part of the secular world. Freud embraced that freedom, and it allowed him entry into a world that appeared to be tracing an arc toward justice. It was within such a universe that psychoanalysis emerged.

But by the time Freud had entered his 60's, the world he knew had descended into the moral chaos of the first World War. The killing of the Great War had been followed by an epidemic of what we now call PTSD and “moral injury,” as well as a real plague (the Spanish Flu), which had been largely forgotten until our own plague (Covid) brought it back to memory.

In this atmosphere, understandably, Freud's thinking turned more pessimistic.

This pessimism found expression in a number of concepts that he developed at that time. In 1923, Freud’s metaphoric view of the mind began to include an unconscious, punitive tendency that he called the superego. In his metapsychology, the possibility of inciting punishment from a harsh superego produced the anxiety signal that resulted in repression. Psychoanalytic technique became focused on attenuating the harshness of the superego to facilitate a more adaptive reconciliation with the id- that is, with personal truths that were hard to accept. At times this led to working through and healthier defenses, especially sublimations. But at other times, as Freud, observed, some patients’ conditions paradoxically worsened following his expressions of hopefulness or satisfaction with their progress. As he reflected on this phenomenon, the oedipal story and oedipus’ self punishment became incorporated into his understanding of psychoanalytic process in the form of what he called the “negative therapeutic reaction.”

“Every partial solution that ought to result, and in other people does result, in an improvement or a temporary suspension of produces in them for the time being an exacerbation of their illness ....

There is no doubt that there is something in these people that sets itself against their recovery and dreads its approach as though it were a danger. We are accustomed to say that the need for illness has got the upper hand in them over the desire for health. If we analyze this resistance in the usual way—then, even after we have subtracted from it the defiant attitude toward the physician and the on the various kinds of advantage which the patient derives from the illness, the greater part of it is still left over; and this reveals itself as the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery, more powerful even than such familiar ones as narcissistic inaccessibility, the assumption of a negative attitude toward the physician or a clinging to the advantages of the illness. In the end we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a 'moral' factor, a sense of guilt, which is finding atonement in the illness and is refusing to give up the penalty of suffering.” (Freud, 1923, pp. 49–50).

For the last several decades of psychoanalytic theorizing, the focus on guilt as a source of psychic suffering has been replaced by a focus on the vicissitudes of connection and attunement. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of this shift was expressed by Heinz Kohut, when he spoke of the difference between Freud's vision of “Guilty Man” and his own vision of “Tragic Man” (Kohut, 1977, pp. 132–133). Indeed, Kohut brought a fresh understanding to our efforts to make sense of ourselves by highlighting how thwarted ambitions and shattered ideals resulting from failures of empathy cast a tragic shadow and deadened the self in ways that, once recognized, could be addressed and ameliorated.

Kohut's awareness of the importance of empathy, attunement and connection fit very well with what child researchers were learning about early development, what object relations theorists were discovering about the “pre-oedipal,” and what relational analysts were discovering about the two -person field. These advances have had a liberating effect on psychoanalytic technique and therapeutics.

But while this expansion of our psychoanalytic consciousness has opened up dimensions of psychological experience that were previously inaccessible, one of the consequences has been the closing off of other aspects that in some instances remain clinically relevant. In particular, Freud's view of the importance of guilt remains, to my experience, fundamentally useful in understanding ourselves. The way we manage our guilt as individuals may be relevant to the way we manage our guilt as societies, and the histories of our efforts may tell us something about the trajectory of the arc as it bends toward and away from justice.

*During my own psychoanalytic education, which took place in the 1990's, the “negative reaction concept” was for the most part viewed as archaic. It's appearance, according to one of my most admired teachers, was a signal that treatment had taken place within a “false self,” and that early defects in object relations had been overlooked, leading to failed treatments that blamed the patient for the analyst's failure of understanding. While this is clearly a useful clinical observation, I think it's an incomplete point of view.

Freud originally placed the origins of guilt in the Oedipal Period, related to triangular conflicts and the male's fear of castration by his father. Later on, Melanie Klein (1948) located the developmental origins of guilt in the psychological struggles of early infancy, as we try to manage our aggressive drives toward the mothers to whom we are libidinally attached. The infantile solution to this, the problem of ambivalence, lies in splitting and projection of elements of ourselves onto others. In that way, we attempt to protect those we love and need from our own inherent destructiveness.

Later on, Winnicott expanded upon the importance role of reparation in the development of the capacity to own and integrate the destructive feelings that are part of our human nature (Winnicott, 1960). For Winnicott, the reparation process is facilitated by a mothering environment that can withstand the aggression that comes with loving, and that offers the opportunity for what he called “contributing in:” ):

“In favorable circumstances there builds up a technique for the solution of this complex form of ambivalence. The infant experiences anxiety because if he consumes the mother he will lose her, but this anxiety becomes modified by the fact that the baby has a growing contribution to make to the environmental-mother. There is a growing confidence that there will be opportunity for contributing in, for contributing to the environmental-mother, a confidence that makes the infant able to hold the anxiety. The anxiety held in this way becomes altered in quality and becomes a sense of guilt.” (Winnicott, 1963, p. 104).

As childhood progresses, our own individual acquaintance with guilt comes through encounters with parental authority, which can gratify and punish according to rules that we, as developing children, need to discern.

The way we struggle with these rules, and the way that our parents struggle with our struggle, sets the stage for the rules we carry with us and the punishments we expect, through unconscious identification, as we grow into adulthood. (It bears saying that along with the rules our parents live by, we carry the imprint of their contradictions, i.e., the rules they espouse but don't follow) and the ways in which they manage their own guilt (i.e., the ways in which they approach their own moral failings).

Entry into the adult world means entering into relation with non-parent others in a social arena that has its own rules. As social beings who depend upon one another, we find ourselves having to contend in one way or another with the conflicts between our own desires and the rules/values that govern the societies that sustain us. Society depends on guilt in order to function.

A prime example can be found in our ambivalence toward the taxation necessary to maintain the structure of our societies. Nobody likes to pay taxes. We do it because of a sense that we will get into trouble if we don't, whether that trouble comes from the outside or from the guilty consciences we would have if we didn't.

Freud's concept of superego introduced an additional element that is very useful in characterizing the nature of guilt. What makes guilt so unbearable at times is its cruel quality. Just as the breaking of societal norms has led to the most horrifying state administered punishments, the breaking of internalized norms and the accompanying experience of guilt can lead to the most cruel treatment of the self. Freud located the sadistic aspects of the superego in the unconscious and he emphasized the work that the individual psyche performs to keep them there.

The management of guilt throughout history and across cultures is a worthy subject for study in it own right. Guilt exists across cultures, and the form it takes is stamped by culture, and to a large degree determined by it. But there is also evidence that guilt is a ubiquitous emotion that comes with being human (Etxebarría, 2000).

To a large extent, guilt has been the province of organized religion, especially monotheism. Religions have used guilt as a means of social control, as can be seen in theocracies around the world. Guilt is a major factor in maintaining the social status quo.

Those who challenge the status quo often do so at their own risk. Gross transgressions (i.e., crimes), at times, lead to removal from society through incarceration. But there is another group of challengers to the established order. They are the prophets, the whistle blowers, the “enemies of the people” who risk criticism, ostracism, or crucifixion by speaking truth to power, bringing down upon themselves the full weight of the unconscious guilt those they are speaking to want to avoid. (Perhaps we should we include psychoanalysts in this group, and why our profession is so fundamentally impossible.)

Freud made a major effort to distance psychoanalysis from the religious universe in which he had grown up, and to align it with the scientific enlightenment he associated with the secular world. (How successful he was remains a source of debate, as we have come to appreciate the degree to which psychoanalysis, in its institutions and epistemology, asks that we “take it on faith.”)

But one of his major achievements was to take the psychological wisdom of religion and draw upon it in his thinking about individuals and society at large. His insights into individual psychodynamics draw heavily on his Jewish upbringing. Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, provides the community with a ritualized way of holding sadistic punishment from an angry God in abeyance so that one can introspect, look at one's internal moral gaps, and address them in a realistic way (Teshuvah). It's a short road from there to “where id was, ego shall be” and Freud's second theory of anxiety in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.”

Freud's works on cultural anthropology (Future of An Illusion, Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism) reflect his own irresistible temptation to understand how guilt shapes the moral universe. Toward the end of his life Freud's focus on the “Death Instinct” and his appreciation of the destructive power of guilt left him with serious doubts about the future of humanity. At the end of Civilization and Its Discontents he frames the flow of history as a competition between eros and destructiveness (Freud, 1930) While he states his hope that eros come out the winner, his overall tone is one of an understandable pessimism, given the trajectory of the moral universe in the final years of his life.

But much destructiveness takes its shape when we're not paying attention, placing eros (in its most benevolent form) at a disadvantage, and preventing guilt from exercising a tempering influence on our worst impulses. We don't attend because we can't allow ourselves to grasp the emotional significance of what we see with our own eyes.

While Freud did not have the opportunity to fully develop his ideas on Disavowal, in subsequent years its importance has become more fully recognized, dovetailing with similar concepts from outside of psychoanalysis like cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.

One of Kohut's major achievements was to recognize the power of disavowal in maintaining what he called “vertical splits” in individual psychological disturbance. This complements Freud's work by providing a conceptual umbrella for the way that Disavowal operates in the social field. While we psychoanalysts (at least, in the West) tend to be monotheistic in our theories, if we can hold both Tragic man and Guilty man in mind at the same time perhaps we can begin to appreciate how disavowal itself can defend us from the guilt i.e., necessary for course correction. Carveth (2001, p. 20) expresses it beautifully:

“Without denying the role of broader social processes in shaping the familial and childhood experiences that structure character and disposition, it seems to me that guilt is and always has been hard to bear and guilt-evasion is and always has been prevalent. Aside from the sociocultural factors that shape and channel guilt, the forms taken by guilt-evasion vary as different cultures and historical periods offer differing versions of what Shorter (1992) has called the ‘legitimate symptom-pool’ (p.x). If one culture legitimates hysterical paralyzes and compulsions, another recognizes multiple personality disorder and environmental illness. The guilty subject who cannot bear feeling guilty will evade guilt-feeling one way or another.”

At the larger societal level, if letting in the light threatens us with such harsh self punishment, we are apt to keep our eyes closed to our shortcomings and the possibilities of reparative action. As in Freud's negative therapeutic reaction, the arc of the moral universe can easily bend back upon itself as we become entrenched in disavowal rather than suffer unbearable guilt as we attempt to face our imperfections.

“A person will spend his whole life writhing in the clutches of the superficial, psychological symptoms of guilt unless he learns to speak its true language… Facing and bearing guilt opens the path toward restoration of a sense of inner goodness through reparative processes mediating identification with resurrected, surviving, good and forgiving internal objects. If advance in civilization entails an increased capacity to confront and bear guilt, then a first step may be to learn to speak its true language, not least by ceasing to confuse it with the self-torment that represents its evasion.” (Carroll, 1985, p. 15).

Perhaps if we could learn to bear guilt in a productive way, we could do less repeating and keep the arc bent in the right direction. Certainly, this is a theme in the way many of us approach our work with patients. We frequently find that once the light gets in, we have the problem of dealing with what we see, leading to defensive retreats (negative therapeutic reactions) and enactments that can swallow up patient and analyst.

It's at this juncture that I'd like to try to pull together the various strands that have coursed through these pages. As psychoanalytic clinicians we have long struggled theoretically and clinically to help many of our patients move from harsh self -punishment to more productive self-assessment. For years, many of us were guided by Strachey's classic paper (Strachey, 1934) on therapeutic action, in which, informed by Klein's ideas, he conceptualizes the “mutative” transference interpretation that breaks the vicious circle of guilt and projection. As clinicians, we know (as did Strachey) that this is no magic bullet, much easier said than done, and that interpretations alone are too often limited in their efficacy when it comes to helping patients see, feel, and take responsibility for those aspects of themselves which they would rather not encounter.

Hence, the importance of Winnicott's ideas about the importance of “contributing-in.” In order for the patient to move closer to owning destructive feelings, Winnicott implies that the analyst must create an ambience that allows and cherishes the patient's contribution as a possible therapeutic way-station for a more integrated management of guilt.

As our field has moved toward normalizing what was at one time called “two-person” psychoanalysis and now has found its fullest expression in relational psychoanalysis, we have given much greater latitude toward all kinds of give and take between patient and analyst. Along with this expansion of focus to the psychoanalytic dyad has come a deeper appreciation of the analyst's role in allowing the patient's dissociated affects into the room. While the psychology of guilt has not been a primary focus in this clinical development, its importance is implicit in the understanding of our challenges in approaching the traumatic repetitions we call enactments.

In this world of enactments, we as analysts are now confronted with the task of facing our own destructiveness in order to help our patients face their own. Jessica Benjamin's ideas about finding an “analytic third,” beyond “doer and done to,” (Benjamin, 2004, p. 10) highlight the importance of this quest to the analytic process and analytic technique:

“In the doer/done-to mode, being the one who is actively hurtful feels involuntary, a position of helplessness. In any true sense of the word, our sense of self as subject is eviscerated when we are with our “victim,” who is also experienced as a victimizing object. An important relational idea for resolving impasses is that the recovery of subjectivity requires the recognition of our own participation. Crucially, this usually involves surrendering our resistance to responsibility, a resistance arising from reactivity to blame. When we as analysts resist the inevitability of hurting the other—when we dissociate bumping into their bruises or jabbing them while stitching them up, and, of course, when we deny locking into their projective processes with the unfailing accuracy of our own—we are bound to get stuck in complementary twoness.”

(I'd like to note here that with all we can do as analysts, for many of our patients there may be physiologic limits to the efforts of establishing affective immediacy in the consulting room through verbal interaction (Van der Kolk, 2014). Recent developments in the use of psychedelics suggest these agents can be useful in tempering the experience of guilty self awareness, and keep the window of self reflection open long enough to permit a degree of processing and integration that could not otherwise be attained.)

At the end of the road, “dealing with things” means mourning. As Basch (1983) points out, disavowal is a major obstacle encountered when trying to help patients deal with unresolved grief. One of the most poignant and challenging experiences, for patient and analyst alike, is the recognition of the opportunities we missed and the time we exhausted by maintaining character defenses that we have the option to change. Change is often accompanied by regret at what we have done to ourselves through unconscious efforts to protect ourselves. This is essentially the depressive position as outlined by Melanie Klein (1948), one made possible by an increasing tolerance for guilt. It provides an alternative for where many of us spend much of our time, that is, in what she called the “paranoid position.” In the paranoid position, it's not my fault-it's yours.

In the hyper-polarization that characterizes the contemporary socio-cultural field, it is easy to apply these ideas about splitting, projection and paranoia. But, as many of us have found in our clinical work, it seems more difficult to hold on to the idea that intolerable guilt may be lurking behind the paranoid position that seems to be enveloping society.

At this larger societal level, could our own psychoanalytic formulations and clinical experience be useful? Is there a way that we as psychoanalysts could help to further a social discussion that helps us manage our guilt, to help us keep our eyes open long enough to make societal choices that would move us toward the just without having to poke our eyes out or find others to attack so that we can absolve ourselves of the unbearable discrepancies between who we are and what we aspire to be?

Winnicott's ideas about “contributing-in” surely have application here. In his view, the opportunity for an infant to “contribute-in” to a receptive environmental mother was the foundation of our capacity for the concern that forms the basis of the moral universe. Perhaps a lesson here is that our society needs to function as a good “environmental mother” to provide opportunities for marginalized groups to “contribute-in” as part of the process of repair and reconciliation.

Kabasakalian-Mckay and Mark (2023) make a compelling case that the current work being done on enactments by relational psychoanalysts provides a model for reconciliation and repair in the world beyond our consulting rooms, and for fostering processes that might create that “Third” space from which we can move beyond the position that Klein calls “Paranoid” and Benjamin calls “Doer and Done To.”

In fact, Benjamin makes the moral dimensions of this task explicit in her concept of The Moral Third, which “emphasizes…the specific acknowledgment of relational and social violations. Meeting the need for acknowledgment, the affirmation of violations of expectancy, and the wrong things that need to be put right becomes the basis for the experience we might call the lawful world…only when we experience that Third can we begin to subjectively encompass the meaning of taking responsibility for our implication and for the fate of the Other who is dependent upon us." (Benjamin, 2023, p. 54).

According to Benjamin, as therapists we surrender our entrenched subjectivity and seek the position of the “Moral third” on behalf of our patients because it's the right thing to do.

Just as we analysts struggle to face ourselves in our clinical work, there are places in the world where humanity appears to be trying to face itself. Germany and South Africa come to mind. This is certainly an issue of the moment her in our United States, in this window of time where events have provided a view of the moral universe that challenges us to engage with all the ego we can muster. Many museums and libraries are attempting to bring in new light. We are engaged in a national discussions about monuments and memory that offers new possibilities if we can grasp them.

Just as the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis spoke of “good trouble,” I think our psychoanalytic explorations, such as those I've outlined above, have indicated there can be “good guilt.” Guilt can be a signal that there's a debt to be repaid, an act that needs to be remedied, a wrong we have committed to be made right.

In her paper “Pour a Libation for Us,” Martha Bragin (2019) offers a poignant example of how the recognition of guilt led to healing in her work with former “child soldiers” in a war-ravaged Sierra Leone. She outlines a communal ritual in which the collective participation of the community created a kind of “communal” third that facilitated reparation for the unspeakable acts of violence that these children had committed, that had been perpetrated upon them, and in which she herself was an “implicated subject.” Using ideas from Klein, Winnicott and Benjamin, she demonstrates how psychoanalytic understanding might be used at the societal level in the service of recognizing and addressing the destructiveness that had been unleashed, and setting the stage for potential integration. In a more general sense, perhaps, I think we can make a contribution by retaining an appreciation and a language that facilitates a mature recognition of guilt and the defense against it as relevant shapers of the arc of the moral universe that we try to bend toward justice. It would be a tragic loss to do otherwise.

In summary, I have tried above to emphasize the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas about guilt to the challenges and opportunities we face in the present historic moment. In the simplest terms, until we can bear the guilt that comes with acknowledging our responsibility for the iniquities that we create and maintain, facing the moment is impossible, and we are bound to bend the arc away from justice.

Our struggle as developing individuals to take mature responsibility for our destructive impulses has a parallel with the struggle we face in our efforts to create a just society. As individuals and societies, the weight of this task often becomes more than we can bear. As individuals and societies we try to lighten the load by disavowing our internal contradictions and thereby ensuring their persistence. In this way, guilt is replaced by the search for someone to blame. The path to mature responsibility becomes instead the road to repeating patterns of destructive behavior directed toward others or harshly punitive behaviors directed toward the self, alternatives that stand in the way of true reflection. Or, to put it a bit differently: our failure to acknowledge guilt in a mature way helps to create Tragic Man.

As psychoanalysts, we do have some ideas about how to move in a healthier direction. In our work with patients we have the opportunity to foster a sense of individual responsibility for our hate as well as our love. By so doing, we can help our patients bear the guilt and responsibility necessary to work toward a just society.

More directly, as the work of the relational school suggests, we can help by confronting our own disavowal and acknowledging that analysis takes place in a social context where we are “implicated subjects.” By expanding our sphere of activity to work beyond the dyad, we can find a broad spectrum of ways to “contribute in.”

Most important, from my perspective, is that we psychoanalysts maintain our focus on the importance of guilt and destructiveness in human psychological life. These phenomena need to remain a central part of our psychoanalytic observational field if we are to keep our eyes open and let in the light coming through the cracks we see all around us.