I feel guilty

Adam Phillips

  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Further Psychoanalytic Explorations by Nina Coltart
    Free Association, 200 pp, £15.95, December 1992, ISBN 1 85343 186 9
  • The Damned and the Elect by Friedrich Ohly, translated by Linda Archibald
    Cambridge, 211 pp, £30.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 521 38250 5

When Freud insisted that psychoanalysis had nothing to do with ethical enquiry, was not in the business of making moral worlds or of providing a new Weltanschauung, he was trying to dissociate himself from the Judaism of his forefathers, and trying to dissociate psychoanalysis from any connection with religion (or mysticism). If psychoanalysis was seen to be compatible with traditional religious belief it would lose both its scientific credibility and its apparent originality. But one is only absolutely original, of course, until one is found out.

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