Freud’s Red Thread: Explorations of the Unconscious Sense of Guilt

Freud’s Ontological Struggle with the Unconscious Sense of Guilt

Freud’s language about the “unconscious sense of guilt” betrays how it both captivates and vexes him. He calls it “bewilder[ing]” (1923, p. 27), “paradoxical” (1915b, p. 177), “obscure” (1915a, p. 292), and “an apparent contradiction in terms” (1907, p. 123). He also uses an array of other names for it. Early on, he aligns it with “a taboo conscience” or “taboo sense of guilt” (1911, p. 225), as well as a “dread of conscience” (1913, p. 68). He analogizes it with “the doctrine of primal guilt, of original sin” (1915a, p. 292). He goes on to associate it with a need for punishment (1919b), the superego, the ego ideal, self-criticism (1923), and the negative therapeutic reaction (1924). It is important to note that Freud’s choice of word for guilt, Schuld, is also translated as debt. Freud is not only pointing to guilty feelings; he is addressing a haunting sense of obligation, burden, or responsibility.

In his remarks on Freud’s “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), James Strachey brings our attention to Freud’s particular wording, “eines unbewußten Schuldbewußtseins,” which more literally means an unconscious consciousness of guilt and so better conveys the “contradiction in terms” to which Freud points (p. 123). What Freud could not quite recognize was that unconscious guilt is the fruit of après-coup: it can be defined only as it comes to the light of consciousness through self-defeating behavior. Here I am bending the notion of après-coup from Freud’s original formulation, in which a traumatic event in childhood emerges as traumatic only in adulthood, when the sexual nature of the trauma can be comprehended. With an unconscious sense of guilt, two points in time converge, such that a feeling of self-reproach can be identified and owned only in the aftermath of self-punishing behavior or a parapraxis.

Hamlet, for Freud, is the poster child of this contradictory affective expression. Freud proposes that Shakespeare unconsciously portrayed “the unconscious of his hero” (1897, p. 272) by dramatizing the way in which Hamlet’s conscience interfered with avenging his father’s death. Deep down, Freud suggests, Hamlet harbored the same murderous feeling toward his father that his uncle had. “His conscience,” Freud continues, “is his unconscious sense of guilt,” and he ultimately allies with this conscience by “bring[ing] down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival” (p. 273). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) elaborates:

Hamlet is able to do anything—except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish [p. 265].

With the character of a modern-day neurotic, Hamlet’s parricidal and incestuous wishes remain repressed and it is unconscious guilt—an outgrowth of these wishes—that is enacted outside his awareness through his paralysis.

Another example of unconscious guilt can be found in an autobiographical account of a “bungled action” in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). Having just learned that his daughter, Matilde, was likely to survive an illness when he had been fearing the worst, Freud “yielded to a sudden impulse and hurled one of [his] slippers from [his] foot at the wall, causing a beautiful little marble Venus to fall down from its bracket” (p. 169). He explained that “this wild conduct and [his] calm acceptance of the damage” was a performance of a “sacrificial act,” whereby Freud paid a debt in exchange for his daughter’s recovery (p. 169). Thus, unconscious guilt can be a paralyzing, self-defeating inhibitor of success, as Hamlet illustrates, or it can manifest as a punishment in the wake of moments of triumph, success, or good news, where it functions to level the scales.

Neither Hamlet nor Freud himself was conscious of guilty feelings. Rather, unconscious guilt is evident when a person is caught in a torrent of self-punishment but must go looking for the crime of which she feels guilty. In this regard, unconscious guilt presents as an uncanny enactment. It trips up the linearity of time, as we can see it only in the rear-view mirror. We need to enact our guilt through self-defeating behavior before we can apprehend the feelings that have been churning under the surface.

Along with the temporal ambiguity of the unconscious sense of guilt, Freud tangles with three definitional enigmas. How, he wonders, could affects be unconscious? How, he asks, could a sense of conscience be unconscious? Further, what could account for the power of this complex affective experience? The unconscious sense of guilt presses each of these buttons.

In “The Unconscious,” Freud (1915b) wonders how we might understand the “unconscious consciousness of guilt” (p. 177), when there are no affects in the unconscious, only nonverbal thing-representations or mnemic traces that would give rise to intolerable feelings were they to surface in one’s awareness. How can we understand obsessional neurotics whose behavior enacts guilt, but who are aware only of a compulsion for punishing behaviors? Freud’s answer is that when affects get displaced from the ideas that give rise to them, we are inclined to call them unconscious affects. We recognize anxiety or guilt, but we cannot identify its source, or we are aware that the idea giving rise to the feeling seems disproportionate to the feeling itself. An unconscious sense of guilt functions in precisely this manner: “Its affect was never unconscious; all that had happened was that its idea had undergone repression” (p. 178). What is unconscious is the idea or impulse that gives rise to the burden of guilt.

Freud goes on to consider how one’s conscience could be unconscious. As he writes in Totem and Taboo (Freud 1912–1913),

For what is ‘conscience’? On the evidence of language it is related to that of which one is ‘most certainly conscious’. Indeed, in some languages the words for ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness' can scarcely be distinguished.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us. The stress, however, is upon the fact that this rejection has no need to appeal to anything else for support, that it is quite ‘certain of itself’. This is even clearer in the case of consciousness of guilt—the perception of the internal condemnation of an act by which we have carried out a particular wish. To put forward any reason for this would seem superfluous: anyone who has a conscience must feel within him the justification for the condemnation, must feel the self-reproach for the act that has been carried out [pp. 67–68].

At this time, Freud is construing the unconscious as a “cauldron full of seething excitations” (1933, p. 73), and he cannot place an unconscious conscience in that pot. The unconscious sense of guilt instigates Freud’s development of the tripartite model in The Ego and the Id. It forces him to postulate that aspects of the ego are beyond awareness, and that these unconscious elements are not exclusively what he calls the “lower passions,” urges that are more animal and instinctual (1923, p. 26). Indeed, self-criticism and a sense of conscience, outgrowths of the superego, are often unconscious, which draws Freud back to this red thread of unconscious guilt. Unconscious guilt, Freud claims, “bewilders us . . . and sets us fresh problems, especially when we gradually come to see that in a great number of neuroses an unconscious sense of guilt of this kind plays a decisive economic part and puts the most powerful obstacle in the way of recovery” (p. 27).

A final paradox in Freud’s definition of the unconscious sense of guilt lies in one explanation of its power and pervasiveness: the secret pleasure derived from this intensely painful experience. Freud (1907) initially addresses the outsized role of an unconscious sense of guilt in the symptomatology of obsessive neurosis, where ruminations, compulsions, and prohibitions are experienced as torturous or punishing, and yet patients do not feel guilty. Freud describes how obsessional patients are haunted by a foreboding apprehension of misfortune or loss, feelings that are attached to a sense of temptation. To ward off the feared catastrophe, ritualized actions are constructed that function as a defense. The temptation being warded off harks back to a childhood indulgence. Compulsions then function both as punishment that betrays guilt and as remedy to prevent it. Freud astutely adds that over time, however, these punishments take on some of the pleasurable feelings they were intended to prevent; they become a disguised continuation of earlier indulgences. This elucidates one aspect of the power of unconscious guilt: it evolves into a libidinal pleasure with which a patient is reluctant to part. The patient feels guilty, but has lost sight of the source of this guilt; the patient suffers from this guilt, but the guilt becomes married to hidden pleasures. Unconscious guilt defends against pleasures, but also comes to satisfy the very desires that provoked it. (Here Freud’s ideas yield in the direction of Lacan’s concept of jouissance. ¹ )

In addressing masochism in “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Freud (1919a) elaborates this paradox, seeing the mixture of pleasure and guilt as an expression of ambivalence. Whereas obsessional neurotics are tortured by sadistic fantasies they fend off through ritualized behaviors, masochists secretly admit to sexual pleasure in the company of fantasies about others or even themselves being punished. Obsessional neurotics have hidden the gratifications of guilt from themselves; masochists, in contrast, are aware of these pleasures, though ashamed to own them. Freud’s focus in this text is on the female experience of the oedipus complex, which he feels places a strong propensity for guilt onto women. Freud depicts a complex, multilayered set of oedipal dynamics:

The affections of the little girl are fixed on her father, who has probably done all he could to win her love, and in this way has sown the seeds of an attitude of hatred and rivalry towards her mother. This attitude exists side by side with a current of affectionate dependence on her, and as years go on it may be destined to come into consciousness more and more clearly and forcibly, or else to give an impetus to an excessive reaction of devotion to her [p. 186].

Freud makes note of another presentation of unconscious guilt in this context: women whose guilt is expressed through “excessive devotion” to their mothers, where reaction-formation elides their aggressive feelings. It is ambivalence—a mix of love and hate—that feeds the pleasurable pain of masochism and unconscious guilt.

In his essay on Dostoevsky, Freud (1928) places special emphasis on the role of ambivalence in the oedipal situation of the boy, as well. Freud asserts that boys teeter between tender love for their fathers, whom they wish to emulate, and aggressive rivalry with this father, whom they wish to replace in receiving their mother’s affections. Aggressive urges are met with a fear of castration, which propels the boy to relinquish his wish for his mother. And here Freud adds, “In so far as this wish remains in the unconscious it forms the basis of the sense of guilt” (p. 183), an inevitable outcome of a normal oedipal development. Freud goes on to contend that bisexuality yields an opposite version of this story, in which the boy’s love for his father takes center stage, but that this stirs fear of castration in identifying with a feminine role. This fear, Freud emphasizes, has an internal origin, and it is the struggle of love and hate that can create one vulnerability to neurosis for men. The working through of these oedipal dynamics leads to a profound identification with the father, who is internalized as a separate aspect of the ego:

We then give it the name of super-ego and ascribe to it, the inheritor of the parental influence, the most important functions. If the father was hard, violent and cruel, the super-ego takes over those attributes from him and, in the relations between the ego and id, the passivity which was supposed to have been repressed is re-established. The super-ego has become sadistic, and the ego becomes masochistic—that is to say, at bottom passive in a feminine way. A great need for punishment develops in the ego, which in part offers itself as a victim to Fate, and in part finds satisfaction in ill-treatment by the super-ego (that is, in the sense of guilt). For every punishment is ultimately castration and, as such, a fulfilment of the old passive attitude towards the father. Even Fate is, in the last resort, only a later projection of the father [p. 185].

We now see that for boys, as well as girls, ambivalence arouses the sense of guilt, which is also a source of libidinal pleasure that fuels its intensity. The itch that unconscious guilt scratches is both soothing and irritating, revealing a deep conflict of ambivalence that has some role in its force.

We have now seen Freud’s struggles to pin down a definition of unconscious guilt. It can only be recognized retrospectively. It looks like an unconscious affect, but it really is a feeling that has been displaced from a repressed idea. Its unconscious ethical nature fuels Freud’s development of the tripartite model. And although on its surface it is a source of pain, it is often secretly pleasurable, feeding its insistent nature.

Oedipal Enigmas in the Unconscious Sense of Guilt

Throughout his life, Freud would frame an unconscious sense of guilt as a vestige of the oedipus complex in which the superego coalesces as a result of relinquishing incestuous desires. As we examine Freud’s perspective, I hope to further elucidate the way in which unconscious guilt unsettles Freud’s model of linear time and also sheds light on the unreachable expansiveness of human desire that Lacan brought into focus.

Freud’s pervasive claim is that the unconscious sense of guilt is an essential by-product of the oedipus complex, but his careful elaboration of oedipal dynamics undermines his argument. Contrary to popular renditions of oedipal conflict, Freud’s account is riven by competing conflicts that emerge from his claim of universal bisexuality in human nature. Thus, Freud describes positive and negative trajectories, and suggests that the identification with the father is better worded as an identification “with the parents” (1923, p. 31n). The case is made, however, that giving up the object-cathexis with one parent—fueled by guilt—leads to an identification with the other parent, and that the same process occurs along the opposite path. These identifications are the foundation of the superego.

At the dissolution of the Oedipus complex the four trends of which it consists will group themselves in such a way as to produce a father-identification and a mother-identification. The father-identification will preserve the object-relation to the mother which belongs to the positive complex and will at the same time replace the object-relation to the father which belongs to the inverted complex: and the same will be true, mutatis mutandis, of the mother-identification [p. 34].

The superego, Freud argues, embodies a combination of these two identifications.

Freud emphasizes the complexity of the superego: it includes these early object-choices, but also an intense reaction against them. “Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: ‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative’” (p. 34). In this way, Freud elaborates an array of impingements that constrain our choices. How, we might wonder, can we escape a sense of guilt when the path before us is so narrow?

We can now better perceive the temporal paradox bound up in the unconscious sense of guilt, which Freud allies with the superego or ego ideal. In The Ego and The Id, Freud states: “the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex; indeed, it is to that revolutionary event that it owes its existence” (p. 34). The ego ideal, or superego, is understood to be the cause of the repression of the oedipal complex, but also an end product of it. Thus the superego, the actualization of unconscious guilt, catalyzes the process of repressing oedipal desires but is also understood as taking shape only in its aftermath. Years later, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) will cop to this definitional confusion: “As to the sense of guilt, we must admit that it is in existence before the super-ego, and therefore before conscience” (p. 136). Earlier in this text, he speaks directly to this spiraling situation:

If we could only bring it better into harmony with what we already know about the history of the origin of conscience, we should be tempted to defend the paradoxical statement that conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation, or that instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from without) creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual renunciation [pp. 128–129].

This maps onto the après-coup dynamic of unconscious guilt. We can see the superego—the cause of repression—only after the oedipus complex has been repressed. For a child, this would be the inaugural moment of experiencing unconscious guilt: she feels guilty, but in the wake of repressing her incestuous desires, she does not know of what.

From a different perspective, Freud highlights the dark side of the oedipus complex that gives rise to a universal need for punishment, another name for the unconscious sense of guilt. In The Ego and the Id, Freud claims that what he had described in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917b) as an unhealthy response to loss is actually a universal phenomenon in early childhood. The young child’s ego is formed by a melancholic process: an identification assumes the place of a lost object-cathexis. This identificatory process, “especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices” (1923, p. 29). The ego is built upon these identifications, which also allow it to woo the id’s love—and thus tame it. Our identities then emerge from a foundation of loss. Behind this amalgam of identifications that is the ego

there lies hidden an individual’s first and most important identification, his identification with the father ² in his own personal prehistory. This is apparently not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of an object-cathexis; it is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis. But the object-choices belonging to the first sexual period and relating to the father and mother seem normally to find their outcome in an identification of this kind, and would thus reinforce the primary one [p. 31].

The superego embodies the combination of these two identifications, born out of deep loss. The inevitably blighted yearning for more than one can attain from her parents is the seed that blossoms into a lifetime of unconscious guilt. The unconscious sense of guilt, then, can be seen as the representative of the unreachable expanse of our libidinal desires.

The Relentlessness of Unconscious Guilt

Thus far, Freud has constrained the unconscious sense of guilt within oedipal parameters. However, throughout his life he was beset by its power and force, especially as it sabotaged the therapeutic goals of analysis. His recognition of the libidinal undercurrents provides one rationale for its relentlessness, but as Freud follows this red thread, I would argue, it draws him beyond the oedipus complex and, indeed, beyond the pleasure principle.

Freud provides a variety of explanations for how the superego becomes such a demanding taskmaster, feeding our need for punishment or unconscious sense of guilt. He points out that, after all, the superego is “as much a representative of the id as of the external world” (1924, p. 167) and that it embodies the traits of the introjected parents, “their strength, their severity, their inclination to supervise and to punish” (p. 167). But then he wonders, if the parents weren’t brutal forces, how has the superego become so tyrannical? Freud enumerates multiple, overlapping solutions to this problem. He posits that the internalization of the parental role in the wake of the oedipus complex is really a composite of the parents’ superegos, and thus a multilayered, intergenerational set of moral proscriptions that bypass consciousness on their way into our psyches. This yields to a complex ontological claim about the unconscious sense of guilt. On one hand, Freud posits that in the wake of the oedipus complex, aggression and libido are de-fused, such that in the worst cases the superego can function as a “pure culture of the death instinct” (1923, p. 53). Aggression is turned around upon oneself in the form of unconscious guilt, while the libido is freed up to attach to new objects. However, Freud also imagines a re-fusing of libido with the need for punishment in neurosis, such that punishment becomes a surrogate pleasure. The masochistic fantasy that emerges in the wake of the repression of the oedipus complex blends a sense of guilt with sexual love. The fantasy of being beaten serves both as punishment for incestuous desires and as a pleasurable substitute for them. Ultimately, Freud claims that the persistence of incestuous wishes in the unconscious provides a further rationale for the persistence and power of a sense of guilt in humankind. Freud notes that the higher one’s moral scruples, the more ferocious is her superego, as the superego turns aggression around upon oneself. As Freud notes (1930), there is a range of severity in the superegos of various patients, and an array of sources for the more severe presentations, but we are now in a position to observe a circular, spiraling process: libido feeds aggression, which is disguised as unconscious guilt, and guilt in turn pleasures our libido, stirring more aggression. This is one account for the relentlessness of unconscious guilt.

From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be. It is remarkable that the more a man checks his aggressiveness toward the exterior the more severe—that is, aggressive—he becomes in his ego ideal [Freud 1923, p. 54].

Freud would come to sweep all of psychopathology under the carpet of unconscious guilt: “Every neurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment” (1930, p. 139). The need for punishment, an iteration of one’s conscience, springs from aggressive urges that have been co-opted by the superego. In the symptomatic embodiment of an unconscious sense of guilt, 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 symptoms produces in them for the time being an exacerbation of their illness; they get worse during the treatment instead of getting better” (1923, p. 49). The very process of acquiring analytic insight is received as a menace, such that recovery itself is met by the ego as a pressing threat.

Freud describes the negative therapeutic reaction as “a ‘moral’ factor: a sense of guilt, which is finding its satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering” (1923, p. 50). As Freud continues, we can clearly recognize the play of the death drive in his description: “a part of it is carrying on its mute and uncanny activity as a free destructive instinct in the ego and the id” (1933, p. 109). Freud points out that “as far as the patient is concerned this sense of guilt is dumb; it does not tell him he is guilty; he does not feel guilty, he feels ill” (1923, pp. 49–50).

The roots of the resistance to analytic insight date back to alterations in the ego acquired in infancy. Freud explicitly links the death drive with this phenomenon.

No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering. One portion of this force has been recognized by us, undoubtedly with justice, as the sense of guilt and need for punishment, and has been localized by us in the ego’s relation to the superego. But this is only the portion of it which is, as it were, psychically bound by the super-ego and thus becomes recognizable; other quotas of the same force, whether bound or free, may be at work in other unspecified places. If we take into consideration the total picture made up of the phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter [1937, pp. 242–243].

Unconscious guilt and the negative therapeutic reaction are the purest derivatives of the death drive, and it is the death drive—which exists beyond and before the oedipus complex—that fuels unconscious guilt. It is impossible, as Freud acknowledged, to try to pin down the enigmatic nature of the death drive, an inertial urge to return to an inorganic state, and many analysts after Freud have rejected this construct (e.g., Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Edith Jacobson). Freud persists in promoting the death instinct while also deferring to the idea that we can never plainly see it and will have to take his word for it. My own exploration of unconscious guilt includes an effort to locate the function of the death drive, but I would not presume to have resolved its puzzling nature. As Freud acknowledged, the death drive is ultimately a part of our analytic mythology.

The Universal Nature of Unconscious Guilt

Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) can be read as a rumination on the unique implications of unconscious guilt for all of humankind: “My intention [in this book is] to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (p. 134). The guilt Freud is addressing is precisely unconscious guilt: “It is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations” (pp. 134–135).

The strictness of the superego feeds the sense of guilt. The need for punishment emerges as a result of the ego’s fear of its conscience and of external mores. The need for punishment is understood as a product of the death drive, used to lure the id’s attachment to the superego. Unconscious guilt, or a need for punishment, presents a compromise between the ego and the fear of external authority, balancing the libidinal press with the need for the authority’s love. Freud notes that for the superego there is no distinction between aggression that is enacted and fantasized aggression. “Whether one has killed one’s father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death” (p. 132).

Drawing on the death drive, Freud can now offer a universal explanation of the relentlessness of unconscious guilt:

What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? . . . This we can study in the history of the development of the individual. . . . His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of ‘conscience’, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city [pp. 123–124].

Any frustration of aggressive urges heightens the sense of guilt. Since civilization plays a key role in frustrating our aggressive urges, it is united with the death drive as an essential cause of humankind’s unrelenting guilt. But now Freud arrives at a crucial conceptualization of unconscious guilt. It is an expression of the “eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos,” which clearly places it beyond the confines of the oedipus complex. Further, guilt is never primary, but is the psychic embodiment, the by-product, of conflictual desires, ambivalence. We are born into, even constituted by, this conflict of desires, which is what distinguishes humans from animals. To desire is to be in conflict, to be other than one is, to be separated from an outside that one does not have. Eros fuels a grasping for more. Thanatos unleashes a conservative desire for homeostasis, ultimate equanimity. A reconciliation of Eros and Thanatos would be to already possess what one desires. I will return to these ideas to illuminate how this ambivalent conflict promotes unconscious guilt.

The Prehistory of the Unconscious Sense of Guilt

To the end of his days, Freud would view a patient’s unconscious sense of guilt as a by-product of oedipal dynamics, the introjection of harsh and rigid constraints in the inhibition of incestuous desires. And yet in 1913 Freud pursued the prehistory of this affective constellation in his first lengthy endeavor to apply psychoanalytic ideas to the study of anthropology and primeval cultures, Totem and Taboo (1912–1913). This text marks Freud’s first bold extension of the unconscious sense of guilt, as he tied it to a story of human history and even posited that unconscious guilt might be a kind of genetic heritage passed on through generations originating in the experiences of a primal horde. Years before he would describe unconscious guilt as an outgrowth of the oedipus complex, he would construe it as an origin point that instantiates the uniqueness of being human. In this way, by moving backward along Freud’s oeuvre, we are able to appraise aspects of unconscious guilt that Freud overlooks.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud focuses on societally sanctioned prohibitions that he understands as a precursor of conscience. They serve as societal or communal injunctions, in lieu of an internal proscription. The violation of a taboo is then a cause for feelings of guilt. For Freud, taboos and conscience function in synchrony—both generate feelings of right and wrong that demand no explanation. They function as internal laws that cover over wishes that have been repressed. “We should have to suppose that the desire to murder is actually present in the unconscious and that neither taboos nor moral prohibitions are psychologically superfluous but that on the contrary they are explained and justified by the existence of an ambivalent attitude towards the impulse to murder” (p. 70). Freud is positing that throughout time we have developed rules to mask underlying unconscious impulses that have been inherited. These impulses and injunctions against them are unconsciously transmitted from generation to generation. Guilt then is a flag that signals what is hidden behind it: forbidden, transgressive urges. Further, “there is something unknown and unconscious in connection with the sense of guilt, namely the reasons for the act of repudiation. The character of anxiety that is inherent in the sense of guilt corresponds to this unknown factor” (p. 69). Freud imagines an inborn, foundational source of the unconscious sense of guilt. Further, he portrays it as a rabbit’s hole: we feel guilty about aggressive urges, but because we never bring the extent of our aggressive wishes into consciousness, we never fully account for the source and force of our guilt. Years before he would theorize an aggressive instinct, he is claiming a prehistory to our aggressive inclinations—we are born into them.

A few years later, in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud sums up his perspective more succinctly (1915a). “The obscure sense of guilt to which mankind has been subject since prehistoric times, and which in some religions has been condensed into the doctrine of primal guilt, of original sin, is probably the outcome of a blood-guilt incurred by prehistoric man” (p. 292). Freud posits that if the son of God was sacrificed, it must signify an earlier murder of the primal father, who became idealized into a deity in the aftermath. Freud goes on to trace the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” back to our collective unconscious guilt for having killed—more precisely, for having killed our father.

The very emphasis laid on the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ makes it certain that we spring from an endless series of generations of murderers, who had the lust for killing in their blood, as, perhaps, we ourselves have to-day. Mankind's ethical strivings, whose strength and significance we need not in the least depreciate, were acquired in the course of man’s history; since then they have become, though unfortunately only in a very variable amount, the inherited property of contemporary men [p. 296].

For neurotics, guilt emerges from an equivalence between childhood thoughts and actual actions in the wake of the oedipus complex. More broadly, for all of us, guilt descends transgenerationally from an early history in which impulses lead to actions with less cognitive interference. As Freud writes in his essay on Dostoevsky (1928), “Parricide, according to a well-known view, is the principal and primal crime of humanity as well as of the individual. (See my Totem and Taboo, 1912–13.) It is in any case the main source of the sense of guilt, though we do not know if it is the only one” (p. 183).

While Freud frames the unconscious sense of guilt as a representative of inherited instinctual impulses toward murder, he also claims it as “the source of our individual ethical sense, our morality” (1923, pp. 167–168). The unconscious sense of guilt, a subsidiary of the superego, is both the outgrowth of our taboo instincts and the embodiment of conscience.

Later, in New Introductory Lectures, Freud (1933) would describe the superego as a mere theoretical scaffolding: “The hypothesis of the super-ego really describes a structural relation and is not merely a personification of some such abstraction as that of conscience” (p. 64). Unconscious guilt, too, can be seen as a structural relation, and not merely a disavowed feeling. The child internalizes the superego of her parents, and her parents’ parents, along with the guilt of her parents, and her parents’ parents. Freud is thereby conceiving of an intergenerational transmission of our ethical demands, alongside the intergenerational transmission of our guilty, murderous impulses. “Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new changes” (p. 67).

Our ethics, then, originate in our sense of guilt. The commandment not to kill “was acquired in relation to dead people who were loved, as a reaction against the satisfaction of the hatred hidden behind the grief for them; and it was gradually extended to strangers who were not loved, and finally even to enemies” (1915a, p. 294). From this vantage point, Freud again focuses on ambivalence. As he puts it, “intense love and intense hatred are so often to be found together in the same person. Psycho-analysis adds that the two opposed feelings not infrequently have the same person for their object” (p. 281). This ambivalence drives our inalienable feelings of guilt and fuels our ethical prescripts. Our fear of death, our fear of immorality, our very ethics—all are products of our unconscious sense of guilt.

The Temporal Complexity of the Unconscious Sense of Guilt: Unconscious Guilt as Compulsion to Repeat

We have now considered many aspects of unconscious guilt. It is a product of après-coup, visible only in retrospect. Although it is the heir of the oedipus complex, it is also the complex’s primary cause. Its roots extend back across generations, dating to our ancient prehistory. Nourished by the death drive, it is the most powerful resistance to psychoanalytic goals and evidence of the limitlessness of our desires. We are now in a position to reconsider Freud’s view of the unconscious sense of guilt as simply an outgrowth of the oedipus complex and to reappraise its temporal dimensions, in the service of more broadly reconceptualizing Freud’s account of the nature of human desire. I would argue that we can never fully apprehend the source of unconscious guilt, nor can we escape it. It is an essential element of being human.

Unconscious guilt can be seen as a kind of living fossil, carrying generations of guilt and aggression that are internalized without ever reaching consciousness. Unconscious guilt embodies unbearable losses that are rigidly defended, yielding to an internal agency that grows into an immovable source of internal torment. All of us are tripped up by a sense of guilt that seems imbricated in our being, there from the start, and yet deeply tied to our most defining memories and experiences. It is both a given and also a felt consequence of our most elemental desires. Thus, it is always already there, its ultimate origin unknown. To my mind, unconscious guilt might well be the navel of the analytic enterprise.

In this sense, unconscious guilt is a central trigger for the disruption of time in the psychoanalytic project, a driver of deferred action. While Freud would have us believe that incestuous desires drive a repudiation of these desires, which unleashes unconscious guilt, the story works in reverse, too. Something built into our human nature incites repudiation, which presses us into unconscious enactments of transgressive urges, which enhances our guilt.

To better understand the way that unconscious guilt turns time on its head, consider Freud’s later formulations of the nature of affects. In “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), Freud states that “affective states have become incorporated in the mind as precipitates of primaeval traumatic experiences, and when a similar situation occurs they are revived like mnemic symbols” (p. 93). This echoes a report by Jones (1955) of Freud saying “every affect . . . is only a reminiscence of an event” (p. 445). ³ All affects are repetitions. They repeat “very early, perhaps even pre-individual, experiences of vital importance; and I should be inclined to regard them as universal, typical and innate hysterical attacks” (1926, p. 133). Freud further develops this idea in New Introductory Lectures (1933). He posits that it is unavoidable that human beings encounter what he is now calling “traumatic moments,” “a state of highly tense excitation, which is felt as unpleasure and which one is not able to master by discharging it” (p. 93). Freud is now theorizing the way in which guilt—and the fear of guilt—is a repetition of a “very early, possibly pre-individual,” experience. In this sense, we are born into guilt, just as we are born into every intense and inherently traumatic, affective experience. I do not mean to suggest that neonates experience guilt—or any isolable affect—rather, that they are born into an affectively saturated state that will culminate, après coup, in feelings of guilt. It is in subsequent efforts to apprehend feelings of guilt that we strive to untangle a knot that is elemental to our humanity. This is built upon viewing guilt as a structure, and not simply an affect.

It is the return of these traumatic, affective moments that are feared and that we work to avoid. ⁴ This leads Freud into a discussion of what he refers to as “our mythology,” “mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness” (p. 95). He is speaking of Eros and Thanatos, which are in perpetual conflict, even if we are best able to apprehend them in fused form. The compulsion to repeat refutes the pleasure principle by enacting a reproduction of intensely unpleasurable feelings. This, Freud contends, yields evidence of its “‘daemonic’ character” (p. 107). The motive behind this compulsion is the very need for punishment that Freud calls “the worst enemy of our therapeutic efforts” (p. 108). The compulsion to repeat, the negative therapeutic reaction, and all resistance to the therapeutic process now predates the oedipus complex and in fact originates in our earliest days, with a traumatic embroilment in feelings that will give rise to guilt, an unavoidable by-product of the traumatic nature of human development.

Now guilt emerges as an originary, affective trauma that, in the aftermath of the oedipus complex, balloons into a compulsion to repeat. We are born into a sense of guilt that drives the accrual of guilty memories that go on to haunt and impede us for all our days. One might wonder about this universal claim regarding the unconscious sense of guilt. Do we see unconscious guilt in narcissistic or perverse or psychotic pathology? I would argue that unconscious guilt does play a role there, to the extent that it is wrapped up in the ontology of human subjectivity. If we conceive of guilt as a structure, a condition that would give rise to a jury proclaiming our guilt, then this kind of guilt might be visible in us all. Freud’s depiction of “criminals from a sense of guilt” (1916) could be seen as the symptomatic epitome of unconscious guilt. However, if perversion is a reversal of neurosis, then perverse individuals might humiliate themselves through their guilty transgressions. While narcissists might disavow a sense of felt guilt, the shame and contempt they generate in others might illuminate their guilty natures. ⁵ Likewise, the psychotic might project feelings of judgment or persecution onto others, inviting them to be placeholders for their guilty consciences.

Across these many explorations of unconscious guilt, Freud seems to be relying upon an understanding of guilt as a structure, a debt or burden that predates us, extending beyond and before our first encounter with oedipal dynamics. We witness the collapse of linear time, as from infancy we acquire an originary debt of guilt, which drives psychosexual development and actualizes guilt in the context of ambivalence stirred by oedipal dynamics. As those dynamics are worked through, the desirous thoughts are repressed but find expression in many forms—conscience, self-criticism, a need for punishment, masochistic surrender, an overzealous love for the hated parent driven by reaction-formation, the repetition compulsion, the negative therapeutic reaction.

In an association to one of his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recounts a story in which as a small child he shared with his mother his disbelief in the idea that we are “all made of earth and must therefore return to earth” (1900, p. 205). In response, his mother rubbed her palms together to show him the earthy skin she had rubbed off. Freud was astonished and convinced by this gesture, and he quotes Shakespeare’s affirmation of his epiphany: “Du bist der Natur ⁶ einen Tod schuldig” (p. 205). In English this reads, “Thou owest Nature a death,” but the German word schuldig is from the same root as schuld—debt or guilt. This childhood anecdote seems to cut to the heart of Freud’s implicit claim about the structural nature of unconscious guilt: our very birth generates a debt. and as we live we move toward death, which settles the score. The unconscious sense of guilt forces us to reckon with the price of our being—as it trips us up on our ambitions and desires, it forces us to acknowledge the delicate balance of living under the shadow of imminent death. With every capacious achievement or success, our debt increases. And part of our human struggle is to find a way to live with, and even make use of, our inexorable guilt.

Unconscious guilt may well then supersede the oedipus complex—a product of the marriage of Eros and Thanatos, it is imbricated in the very question of our being. It inserts itself into our existence before we can begin to account for its presence, haunting us with a sense of excess for which we must take account. It is the rudder that steers us into oedipal conflict, only to be intensified by it as a result. While Freud would explain Dostoevsky’s unconscious guilt by virtue of his underlying oedipal dynamics, I would argue that the subversive power of creating original art played its own role in inhibiting Dostoevsky, just as we can witness in Freud’s experience of writing The Interpretation of Dreams the immense burden of unconscious guilt (Ackerman 2019). ⁷ This points to the sacrificial role of unconscious guilt that Freud conveyed in his story of hurling his slipper toward the marble Venus statue in the wake of his daughter’s recovery. Ambition, to say nothing of its realization, stirs unconscious guilt, and while an oedipal account of this dynamic is helpful, it doesn’t penetrate the depths of these dynamics.

Deleuze and Guattari (1977) have made a forceful critique of the tyranny of Oedipus within Freud’s theory. But if we read Freud backwards, homing in on his early manuscript, Three Essays on Sexuality, and attending particularly to a recent translation that has omitted all of the later paragraphs and footnotes that Freud tacked onto it, we are able to conceive of the sexual instinct from a broader perspective, outside or beyond what is visible through triangular glasses (Freud 1905). There we see Freud’s model of infantile sexuality as autoerotic, a multiplicity of partial drives, erogenous zones teeming with desire. We find polymorphous perversity and the easy accommodation to an endless array of aims and objects. It is this perspective, I would argue, that has informed Lacan’s rendition of Freudian theory, fleshing out the insatiable essence of human desire. As our desire trips along a path of signifiers, we are forever reaching for what is inherently beyond our grasp. Freud sums this up with the idea that “the finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it” (Freud 1905, p. 73), which is also to say that we can only obtain mere substitutes, destined to fall short of our most elemental longings. Freud adds that “the nature and significance of the sexual object recedes into the background. What is essential and constant in the sexual drive is something else” (p. 12; emphasis added). This model cedes to a fecundity of desire that is equaled by grief. What may be undertheorized, however, is the place of guilt or debt. Here I confess to subverting Freud, distorting his words into saying more than he consciously intends. In every titanic reach for fulfillment, there may be a corollary sense of guilt for the excess of our ambitions. My claim here recruits my own guilt, as I am acting out the very dynamic I am attempting to theorize. ⁸

Alongside the sadness in every disappointment with what we do obtain, there must also be a torturous remorse for wanting “something else,” so very much more. This is the tragic nature of human desire: when it comes to sexual desire, what Freud called libido, Freud apprehends that our appetites are endless. They know no time or bounds—they are insistent and immortal. ⁹ Thus, Freud might underestimate our libido by containing it within an oedipal triangle. We may want to have our way with our mothers, but the story doesn’t end there—it is in our nature to want to possess and consume and transgress the universe, as our libido is the life-blood fueling our every encounter with the world. The taboo against incest is accompanied by a broader taboo of the limitlessness of our desire. As we have already seen, one source of our insatiability may well be the desire to be beyond desire. There is an inherent frustration in facing our limits—death, for instance—as we locate a “something else” that is beyond our reach. What we desire subsumes a desire to possess what we are missing, to swallow up a world that we wish we already owned. Just as the primal wish motivating our dreams is the wish to preserve sleep, our primal human desire is the wish to elude desire, a wish that nothing would be beyond our reach. This is where Eros and Thanatos clash, and their collision may give birth to a kind of self-flagellation, an expression of the unconscious sense of guilt. How can we not be dragged back by guilt as an inevitable accompaniment to our savage appetites? We are indeed born into a debt, as guilt is a fundamental and unavoidable accompaniment to libidinal desire.

Conclusion

As a Victorian man of science, Freud aspired to pin down human nature in an indisputable way. However, his genius and integrity forced him to the unsettling recognition that “the ego is not master in its own house” (1917a, p. 143). We are possessed by an unruly, unmappable unconscious that unsettles us in time and place. Unconscious guilt is one product, symptom, or relic of this daemonic force. Freud couldn’t settle unconscious guilt in his theory and for good reason: guilt is determinative of being human and while analysis can untangle some of the threads in this knot, it maintains an essential presence as an accompaniment to the boundlessness of sexual desire. Unconscious guilt is imbricated in our ethics, our creativity, and our sense of purpose. It is inherently adjoined to our capacity to love. Further, it is existentially bound up in our sense of life’s meaning.