This chapter pursues the idea of a moral psychology of guilt promoted by Bernard Williams and Herbert Morris in their opposition to orthodox political and normative views. It follows Williams’s view that modern liberal society involves a ‘peculiar’ political morality of voluntary responsibility and his underdeveloped line that a naturalistic understanding of ‘psychological materials’ like anger, fear and love is needed. It notes his recognition of the psychological role of the internalised other in human guilt. It pursues Morris’s philosophical account of guilt as involving psychological feeling: ‘rotten, depleted of energy, and tense’ (Morris 1976: 99). It notes the importance of ‘atonement’ and identification with another in his account, the former involving being ‘at one with’ oneself. It identifies the reaction he notes to deep-seated psychological problems and cycles of violence as ‘quantum guilt’. Williams and Morris push philosophy beyond itself to the brink of a new psychological understanding. Following Jonathan Lear, the moral psychology they initiate renders psychoanalysis part of a broader conception of philosophy in line with its original Greek self-understanding. It gives the ancient Socratic principle that we should know ourselves a modern post-Freudian twist.

Taking Herbert Morris’s ethical concepts of guilt, identification, responsibility and atonement as ‘at-one-ment’, this chapter explores their metapsychological basis and somatic link to feeling ‘rotten, depleted of energy, and tense’ (Morris 1976: 99). Exploring Freud’s metapsychology in Civilization and Its Discontents (1985), two conflicting routes to guilt are noted. The more prominent involves internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts. The better but less developed emphasises loving identification with others in the process of ego and superego formation of the self. This second route is in line with Freud’s later structural theory as developed by Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of self-formation makes loving identification the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement as at-one-ment. The superego is an ‘atonement structure’ that is reconciliative, and this links psychoanalysis to Morris’s metaphysics of atonement. The analysis is developed to include ‘prospective identification’, moral and psychological guilt for the violation of a stranger. Emotional disturbance at killing another with whom one could identify is explored and a comparison made with Raskolnikov’s guilt in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A closing section links this chapter to the previous, cementing the metaphysical and metapsychological dimensions of guilt in an expanded understanding of philosophy as both Greek and modern.