ABSTRACT

Certain affects have the peculiar quality of linking the temporal characteristics of the system Cs and the system Ucs (Freud, 1915e). They pointedly exist in the present but are content-wise totally involved with the past. Remorse is one such emotion and regret the other. The former, though often conflated with guilt (Klein, 1935, 1940), has received considerable attention from psychoanalysts. The latter has not. The index to the Standard Edition of Freud’s complete works contains no entry on “regret.” The five major dictionaries of psychoanalysis (Eidelberg, 1968; Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973; Moore & Fine, 1968, 1990; Rycroft, 1968) also do not mention “regret”. The PEP Web, the electronic compendium of psychoanalytic literature spanning 116 years and containing nearly 90,000 entries, lists one single paper (Kavaler-Adler, 2004) with the word “regret” in its title. It is therefore clear that despite its being ubiquitous and troubling, regret as an emotion has received almost no attention within our literature.