ABSTRACT
Pushed by the necessity to understand some surprising therapeutic failures of psychoanalytic treatment, the author undertook a phenomenological study of shame and guilt in neurosis. Analyzing the sequences in ideation and feeling that occur in the patient’s stream of consciousness when shame and guilt have been evoked and cannot be resolved has helped to clarify the process of symptom formation. The author sketches some of the information that has become available since S. Freud’s time that has made it necessary to abandon his theoretical framework. When Freud turned his attention to the origin of guilt in Totem and Taboo, he suggested that it coincided with the origin of civilization. In this respect, he adumbrated the idea that guilt is humanity’s advance over the “primal horde.”
