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The Problems of Guilt
02 December 2022–04 December 2022, 3:30 pm–1:00 pm
Registration is Open: This year, the UCL Psychoanalysis Conference is once again online. Covid and humanity continue to co-evolve; there is some way still to go before it is entirely safe to gather in-person in large numbers. The invasion of a country, like Russia’s of the Ukraine, is different from the invasion of a cell by a virus.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Organiser
-
Psychoanalysis Unit
Protean forms and sources of guilt have been known since antiquity. Today we investigate them with psychoanalysis. In Civilization and its Discontents - a decade after World War I - Freud felt he needed to emphasise the difference that he saw between guilt and remorse (or regret) [1]. In Freud’s view, guilt is a manifestation of the destructive drive which, he had felt driven to conclude, was intrinsic to living things, certainly to human nature. As well as aggression, pleasure in cruel punishments, in inflicting death, it can have a thallium-like quality, producing a deadly feeling which is the negative of what is necessary to feel oneself fully alive.
Therefore, achieving a realistic sense of guilt and responsibility is difficult: guilt always seems either too much or too little, too severe, or too indulgent, the wrong kind, or misdirected. The avoidance of guilt and responsibility can be tempting, even imperative. Guilt persecutes inwardly: it prompts evasion, self-righteousness and blame of others. It figures in extremes of violence, suicide, or grandiose paranoid delusional states. Guilt plays a great part in individual life and in the affairs of nations and peoples. However, it can lead to great undertakings in the endeavour to repair, create and make reparation.
The main papers in this year’s Conference will examine some of these forms of guilt in the fine detail that psychoanalytic treatments can offer.
These will ask: What makes guilt difficult to bear? What causes guilt? What enables an individual to feel more at ease with guilt and thereby thoughtful about what occasions it?
Since guilt is ubiquitous and powerful in determining mental life, it has innumerable ramifications in our feelings of right and wrong action, punishment and forgiveness, belief in a jurisprudence of a God - or otherwise.
More details of format, scope, content, contributors, and chairs of the parallel panels will be posted on the website by late September. If you want to make a contribution, write to us ASAP at events.psychoanalysis@ucl.ac.uk with an abstract/synopsis of your idea/ proposed contribution. We cannot promise there will be space in the Programme, but we do guarantee its careful reading, and, after asking your consent, its possible inclusion in the Conference Pack.
The Clinical Seminars
Some clinical seminars on the afternoon/evening of Friday 2 December, will be in-person, either at Senate House or seminar leaders’ consulting rooms.
If there is demand, more in-person clinical seminars may be offered. We will continually review safety, adapt plans accordingly, and keep you informed. If you decide to attend an in-person clinical seminar do bear in mind that the Conference on Saturday and Sunday will be on-line only. Next year, we hope all to be in-person once again.