(DOWNLOAD) "Some Affective Bases for Guilt: Tomkins, Freud, Object Relations (Silvan Tomkins and Sigmund Freud) (Viewpoint Essay)" by English Studies in Canada # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Some Affective Bases for Guilt: Tomkins, Freud, Object Relations (Silvan Tomkins and Sigmund Freud) (Viewpoint Essay)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 230 KB
Description
MY CONTRIBUTION TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE BEGINS BY RETREATING slightly from the topic and turning quickly to the intimately related one of shame. I do this, no doubt somewhat guiltily, because I find it easier to think about shame than guilt. In fact, I dislike thinking about guilt for many reasons, the most salient being: I am made uncomfortable by the proximity between the legal meanings of guilt and the psychic ones as explicated by the great moderns (Nietzsche, Freud); the felt need to accommodate their ideas on the subject in my own writing; the impossible virtuosity demanded by such debt dynamics, payback, making equivalent, and so on. It seems like a hopeless, discouraging situation, a particular kind of hopelessness or malaise which these writers would precisely identify as the symptoms of a guilty conscience: there are promises I must keep, contributions to civilization I must make. Thinking about guilt, they (and you) might say, makes me feel guilty. And this would be true, as far as it goes, but to leave it at that would be both more self-aggrandizing and less precise than I would like. I find it more useful to say that thinking about guilt makes me angry, or perhaps contemptuous, or frightened, or excited, or ashamed--or combinations of some or all of these affects held together differently to compose distinct emotions; that is, what goes under the name "guilt" may include a number of different ways of feeling and ways of thinking about feeling. In classical psychoanalytic theory guilt can appear to be less a substantive emotion with a shape, texture, and movement of its own than a symptom of a structure: the conscience-constituting relation between super-ego and ego in Freud's later structural model of the psyche. But according to Silvan Tomkins, whose affect theory I will be working within this essay, guilt names several distinct feelings that have tended to be collapsed together: the core affect of shame when interpreted in a specifically moral field, a punitive contempt directed toward the self, and a feeling often following on anger and violence that accompanies an intention to atone or repair that which has been damaged. This essay will bring Tomkins's understanding of these affective bases of guilt into relation both to Freud's writing and the less normative approaches of object relations theory. My goal here is to unfold aspects of Tomkins's affect theory as it offers greater descriptive and theoretical scope and variety for the difficult task of understanding socio-psychic formation than the classical psychoanalytic assumptions about repression; my sense is that these latter may continue to be serving as silent operating assumptions for much literary and cultural criticism.
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