Uses of guilt in the treatment of dehumanization
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9056298 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Harvey Peskin (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 98 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 473-489 |
| Publication date | 2017-04-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7578 • E-ISSN: 1745-8315 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1745-8315.12628 |
| PMID | 28247936 |
| OpenAlex | W2594277039 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
It is likely that under the impact of impending Nazism, aggression theory in late Freud, as presented in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), left the entirety of guilt to self-punishment, thus retracting his view that love functions in the superego as remorse and restitution. This change however, essentially withdraws provision for treating victims of abuse, violence and terror. This paper proposes a paradigm shift that reframes Freud's late instinct theory into a theory of dehumanization by recovering reparative and relational components of guilt. This reframe has major implications for the position taken with regard to the role of witnessing and the moral imperative in recovery from dehumanizing experience, which orthodox psychoanalytic theory has essentially bypassed. Indeed, unless breaches of humanity are confronted by a witness, the life instincts stay merely rhetorical, if not contradictory, by leaving the death instincts to grow unseen and, thus, unopposed. A two-fold formulation of guilt may better address and redress disorders of dehumanization, whereby 'death guilt' (under the sway of aggression) signifies the orthodox, irrevocable guilt of self-reproach for the bad we may have done, and 'life guilt' (under the sway of a moral imperative) the redeemable guilt for the good we have still to do
Aggression · Criminology · Dehumanization · Humanity · Instinct · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Punishment (psychology) · Remorse · Sociology · Law · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology · Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy
| Highly cited | No |
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