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

Abstract

The concept of an “unconscious sense of guilt” bedevils Freud throughout his life, rearing its head in at least twenty-four of his major works and working behind the scenes in many others. In a sense, we can see Freud’s oeuvre, and psychoanalysis more generally, as a discourse of unconscious guilt. While Freud frames the oedipus complex as the central defining dynamic of human experience, the unconscious sense of guilt is arguably the underbelly that both precedes and exceeds that complex. By unraveling a range of complexities within Freud’s conceptualization of unconscious guilt, we will come to see that guilt is an unavoidable by-product of the human condition, intrinsically interwoven with libidinal desire.