Abstract
Chapter 5 elaborates the inference we can draw from Freud that we develop an abstract notion of time on or after acquiring an internally mediated sense of guilt. A developmental progression takes place, according to the author’s reading of Freud, in a two-stage process dependant on an internalisation of what is external. In its first stage, a sense of guilt is evoked only when one’s actions are discovered by an external figure of authority; it is in the second stage, on an internalisation of these authority figures, that guilt becomes an internally mediated proposition from which there is no escape. What Freud calls the ‘time-factor’ [Zeitmoments] seems to develop alongside our internal agencies of observation and judgment.
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Notes
- 1.
The differentiation between what I have described as Freud’s two stages of guilt is one which has been elsewhere designated as a move from shame to guilt: see, for example, the second chapter of Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational entitled: ‘From Shame Culture to Guilt Culture’ (Dodds 1951).
- 2.
Gomperz, whose works on the Greek philosophers remain in Freud’s library, translates the fragment in the context of punishment: ‘Each separate existence here regarded as an iniquity, a usurpation, for which the clashing and mutually exterminating forms of life would “suffer atonement and penalty in the ordinance of time”’ (Gomperz 1905, p. 55). I also benefited from the interpretations of the fragment offered by Burnet (Burnet 1920, p. 3), Barnes (2000, p. 36), Kahn (1960), and Seligman (1962) and, in a wider context, Nietzsche’s writing about the fragment in his unfinished Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Nietzsche 1962). Heidegger wrote an essay on the fragment (Heidegger 2003), comparing his own translation with that of Nietzsche; and Derrida evaluates Heidegger’s reading in terms of the nature of adikia, or injustice, from which he claims all other laws derive (Hodge 2007).
- 3.
Freud collaborated with Josef Breuer in work on hysteria, Freud reaching to Greek myth for a description of its treatment which he thought constituted a ‘Sisyphean task’ (Freud 1893, p. 263). Breuer and Freud became aware that hysterical symptoms were often the result of ‘strangulated affect’ (Freud 1893, p. 255) and that a cathartic release of the hysterical symptom could take place if, through hypnosis, the scene of trauma was revisited so that the previously insufficient reaction to it could be completed. Catharsis, from the Greek katharsis, is acknowledged by Freud as being Breuer’s term: in his short paper, ‘On Psychotherapy’ (Freud 1905), Freud said: ‘[I] have actually come to confine myself to one form of treatment, to the method which Breuer called cathartic, but which I myself prefer to call “analytic” […]’ Freud 1905, p. 259). Catharsis was later described by Freud as ‘the first step to the psycho–analytic method’ (Freud 1919, p. 208). Gomperz’ translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, a copy of which remains in Freud’s library, includes an essay by Von Berger on ‘Truth & Error in Aristotle’s Catharsis Theory’. It contains this sentence: ‘the Cathartic Treatment of Hysteria, which the physicians Dr Josef Breuer and Dr Sigmund Freud have described, is very appropriate for making the Cathartic theory of tragedy understandable’ (as cited in Mitchell-Boyask 1984, p. 29).
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Noel-Smith, K. (2016). Time and Guilt. In: Freud on Time and Timelessness. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59721-2_5
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