Narcissism or Compassion?

[Editor’s note: We asked that Carveth, The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience, be reviewed from two different perspectives.]

I found myself engrossed with the challenging premise that Carveth explores in his richly rewarding book: conscience and superego essentially are two distinct facets of the mental apparatus, and therefore conscience should be considered a fourth structure of the psyche. The Still Small Voice is a thoroughly researched scholarly study of the origins of conscience and superego and is enhanced by a range of clinical examples and descriptions. He describes superego as an early formation, an introjected persecutory bad object (an object is a loved one, significant other in psychoanalytic terminology), and conscience as a developed awareness of the other, an identification with a caring, nurturing loved person. Carveth’s writing style is elegant, yet accessible, so the clinical examples create a sense of alive intimacy for the reader.

As I am a poet, fiction writer, and psychoanalyst, I tend to find myself drawn to a strong narrative line. I was grateful that Carveth’s clinical examples and descriptions are powerfully engaging.

Since Carveth’s topic is guilt and conscience, he addresses uni-

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versal ethical concepts, and since he is a sociologist, psychoanalyst, and psychohistorian, he does so with intellectual depth. Yet he also achieves what the great dramatists and novelists have done, and what Freud did— he tells a good story! Sophocles tells his story of guilty Oedipus, Freud tells his version, and Carveth tells another set of stories about guilt: punitive superego guilt and pangs of conscience love of the object guilt. I am a reader who craves concrete examples to illustrate abstract, and sometimes abstruse, theory. This book meets that craving.

One of Carveth’s “clinical studies” is a chapter devoted to the great British object relations theorist, Harry Guntrip, aptly titled “Harry Guntrip—a Fugitive from Guilt?” The section explores Guntrip’s psyche through the avenue of Guntrip’s theories, and through what we know of Guntrip’s life, particularly Guntrip’s own account, “My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott” (International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 2, 1975: pp. 145-156).

Carveth adds a rich dimension to this well-known tale. Guntrip describes his discovery, in old age. During his second analysis, of the enormous impact on him when he was three-and-a-half years old of the trauma of seeing his baby brother Percy lying dead in his mother’s lap, a memory he repressed and then recovered, leading to his understanding of his sense of his own schizoid isolation and episodes of fatigue and illness. One major contribution Carveth offers, addressing a pivotal dream of Guntrip’s, is that “it did not seem to have occurred to him (whether or not it occurred to his analysts is unknown) that the dream might reflect a guilty wish to keep the brother he imagined he had killed safely dead and buried” (p. 137).

Carveth takes Freud’s talion theory (“The Taboo upon the Dead,” 1912-1913) a step further, writing, “In my hypothesis, in Guntrip’s case the survivor reacted with self-punitive states of inner deadness based on a talion law identification with his dead brother,” because the child Guntrip had not yet achieved sufficient caring and concern, sufficient conscience. He felt guilty because he still adhered to a paranoid-schizoid position, essentially narcissistic, and could not utilize a depressive position concern for the other. Young Harry died inwardly, to avoid punishment for his murderous impulses. He did not feel guilt because he was concerned with harming his brother. Rather, he was afraid of punishment—punitive internalized bad object superego guilt rather than the pangs of conscience.

Carveth also addresses what he calls the “less recognized manifestations of guilt.” In one vignette, he describes C, who suffers from somatic problems, severe rashes, and life-threatening accidents. During analysis, Mr. C recognizes that he resents the burden of tending his aging

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parents, and his feelings of anger and resentment. As he acknowledged and accepted his anger, his rash diminished. Carveth points out that Mr. C’s Christian values led him to feel he should be punished for his death wishes toward his parents and his rage at his negligent siblings, and his punishment is burning in hell, symbolized by his burning rash. Yet because his guilt still focused on a punitive superego, he replaced the relieved symptom with another. He had still not felt guilt for potentially injuring loved objects, and thus he could not imagine reparation, restitution, true atonement. Superego prevailed, not conscience.

In another clinical example, Carveth presents an elaborate unfolding of an analysand’s narcissism, Oedipal conflict and guilt, phallic aggressiveness as a defense against experiencing himself as castrated—all punitive superego driven anxieties. A major defense he used was identification with the aggressor. Yet eventually he was able to identify with his analyst’s attitude of “non-judgmental empathy and sympathy” and thus develop “compassion toward his child self and to reconcile with his troubled conscience, experience contrition for his sins, and defend himself against his sadistic superego” (p. 157).

These clinical explorations beautifully illustrate Carveth’s theoretical constructs, his understanding that superego and conscience are two distinct structures, superego as a more primitive introjected bad object structure, and conscience as an identification with a caring nurturing caretaker.

“In all good conscience,” I cannot conclude without crediting Carveth’s narrative skill, as powerful as the great narrative folk song traditions that call attention to the power of guilt, in songs such as “Run, Sinner Man” and Bob Marley’s “Johnny You Too Bad,” which asks, “Where you gonna run to?” Carveth reminds us that conscience offers a place to run to: reparation and restitution.

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