Sigmund Freud, in his search for the origins of the sense of guilt in individual life and culture, regularly speaks of reading a dark trace, thus referring to the Oedipus myth as a myth about the problem of human guilt. In Freuds view, this sense of guilt is a trace, a path, that leads deep into the individuals mental state, into childhood memories, and into the prehistory of cultureand religion. Herman Westerink follows this trace and analyzes Freuds thought on the sense of guilt as a central issue in his work, from the earliest studies on the moral and guilty characters of the hysterics, via later complex differentiations within the concept of the sense of guilt, and finally to Freuds conception of civilizations discontents and Jewish sense of guilt. The sense of guilt is a key issue in Freudian psychoanalysis, not only in relation to other key concepts in psychoanalytic theory but also in relation to Freuds debates with other psychoanalysts, including Carl Jung and Melanie Klein.
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