Freud, Sebald and the head of Medusa: The unconscious sense of guilt

Int J Psychoanal. 2026 Apr;107(2):184-202. doi: 10.1080/00207578.2025.2569887. Epub 2026 Jun 5.

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Freud’s concept of unconscious guilt (Freud, S. 1923. “The Ego and the Id”. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19. 1-66), as illuminated in Sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz (Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz, Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books). Both writers examine the human impulse to look away from suffering, personal and collective, and the guilt inherent both in avoidance and in bearing witness. Sebald, preoccupied with Germany’s post-war “self-amnesia” (Sebald, W. G. 2003. On the Natural History of Destruction, Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, p. 11), invoked Medusa’s head to symbolise the terrors of confronting trauma, and his novel illuminates both the compulsion to see and the terror of doing so. Austerlitz’s gradual uncovering of his past mirrors the analytic process, where unconscious guilt intensifies the dread of facing unbearable truths. A clinical example illustrates unconscious guilt in the countertransference, where a patient’s pain provoked an impulse to turn away. The paper suggests psychic truths can emerge through the slowing of muscular psychic states and through sustained contact with an analyst who can bear painful projections and retain compassion in the face of guilt.

PMID:42246593 | DOI:10.1080/00207578.2025.2569887