Some Affective Bases for Guilt: Tomkins, Freud, Object Relations

Abstract

MY CONTRIBUTION TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE BEGINS BY RETREATING slightly from topic and turning quickly to 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 for many reasons, most salient being: I am made uncomfortable by proximity between legal meanings of and psychic ones as explicated by great moderns (Nietzsche, Freud); felt need to accommodate their ideas on subject in my own writing; 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 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 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 name guilt may include a number of different ways of feeling and ways of thinking about feeling. In classical psychoanalytic theory can appear to be less a substantive emotion with a shape, texture, and movement of its own than a symptom of a structure: conscience-constituting relation between super-ego and ego in Freud's later structural model of psyche. But according to Silvan Tomkins, whose affect theory I will be working within this essay, names several distinct feelings that have tended to be collapsed together: core affect of shame when interpreted in a specifically moral field, a punitive contempt directed toward 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 into relation both to Freud's writing and 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 difficult task of understanding socio-psychic formation than 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. Guilt has not played much of a role in turns to affect in literary and cultural criticism of last ten years. As very different as writing that falls under this loose rubric has been, much of it shares a couple of important characteristics: an active interest in thinking about relations between psychic and social domains that are not exclusively linguistic, and a shyness about, or a more staunch rejection of, category of the subject, although often this may come with a marked interest in subjectivity or subjective experience. In bringing Silvan Tomkins's affect theory into my own critical writing, I have been wanting to make use of his acute phenomenological accounts of feeling, his broad grounding in twentieth-century empirical psychology, social science, and philosophy, and his specific revision of psychoanalytic theory of drives. Informed by mid-twentieth-century cybernetics and systems theory, Tomkins steered a course between two prevailing psychological theories of his moment, behaviourism and psychoanalysis, both of which tend to undertheorize role that consciousness plays in human behaviour and experience. (1) Like Freud, Tomkins wanted a theory that included possibility of motivational error, or idea that we may be wrong about our own desires or wishes. …