Chapter 9 Summary and Analysis

Guilt slows humans down and deprives us of certain satisfactions. We develop a superego around age five and, until then, we only want what we want. Guilt could be fear of the loss of our own love. While our parents help create our early conscience and others also influence it over time, it is really a result of our "primal struggles with lawless passions and is born of our inner submission to human law." If we do not behave in accordance with our conscience, it will punish and impose guilt on us, which is how we eventually resolve the oedipal complex.

Guilt can be unreasonable, and at times cannot discriminate between bad thoughts and bad deeds. Suffering over bad deeds and excessive punishment may rest on the illusion that we have control over the events in our lives. "By blaming ourself...