This insightful and innovative book sheds light on the complexity of the concept of guilt, while exploring aspects of guilt that have previously been overlooked in psychoanalytic theory and discourse.

Offering original insights on the topic, Donald Carveth looks at Freud’s failure to distinguish persecutory guilt from reparative guilt, and the superego from the conscience. The significance of these distinctions for both psychosocial theory and clinical practice is explored throughout the volume. Carveth distinguishes varieties of punitive guilt, such as justified, unjustified, “borrowed” or induced, existential and collective. He expertly describes patterns of self-punishment and self-sabotage, while also addressing the widespread use of persecutory guilt and self-punishment as a defence against and evasion of reparative guilt, contrition, and reparation. Throughout the volume, Carveth critically reviews a range of recent contributions to psychoanalytic literature to support his theories. Participants should obtain a copy of the book.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

1. Distinguish persecutory guilt from reparative guilt.
2. Distinguish conscience from superego.
3. Explore conflict between conscience and super ego.
4. Study the motives and varieties of guilt evasion.

Don Carveth PhD, RP, FIPA

Don Carveth is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought and Senior Scholar at York University, Glendon College, in Toronto; a Registered Psychotherapist; a training and supervising psychoanalyst in the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis (IPA); and former Director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. He maintains a private practice of psychoanalysis, analytic psychotherapy, and supervision in central Toronto. Although deeply familiar with the perspectives of all the major psychoanalytic authors his orientation is fundamentally that of a Freudian informed by the Kleinian development of Freud’s theory and technique.

Stephen Fowler, MD, FIPA

Stephen Fowler is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Mississauga, who has a strong interest in intersections of psychoanalysis with religious faith, particularly seeking to explore the implications of the meta-psychology of Jean Laplanche for Christianity.