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Guilt (emotion)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs

when a person believes or realizesaccurately or notthat he
or she has compromised his or her own standards of conduct or
has violated a universal moral standard and bears significant
responsibility for that violation.[1] It is closely related to the
concept of remorse.

Contents
1 Psychology
1.1 Defenses
1.2 Behavioral responses
1.3 Lack of guilt in psychopaths
1.4 Causes
1.4.1 Evolutionary theories
1.4.2 Social psychology theories Soul in Bondage by Elihu Vedder,
1.4.3 Other theories created between 1891 and 1892
2 Collective guilt
3 Cultural views
3.1 Etymology
3.2 In literature
3.3 In the Christian Bible
4 See also
5 Further reading
6 References
7 External links

Psychology
Guilt is an important factor in perpetuating obsessivecompulsive disorder symptoms.[2] Guilt and
its associated causes, merits, and demerits are common themes in psychology and psychiatry. Both
in specialized and in ordinary language, guilt is an affective state in which one experiences conflict
at having done something that one believes one should not have done (or conversely, having not
done something one believes one should have done). It gives rise to a feeling which does not go
away easily, driven by 'conscience'. Sigmund Freud described this as the result of a struggle
between the ego and the superego parental imprinting. Freud rejected the role of God as punisher

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in times of illness or rewarder in time of wellness. While removing one source of guilt from
patients, he described another. This was the unconscious force within the individual that
contributed to illness, Freud in fact coming to consider "the obstacle of an unconscious sense of
guilt...as the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery."[3] For his later explicator, Lacan, guilt was
the inevitable companion of the signifying subject who acknowledged normality in the form of the
Symbolic order.[4]

Alice Miller claims that "many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the
sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations....no argument can overcome these guilt
feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest period, and from that they derive their
intensity."[5] This may be linked to what Les Parrott has called "the disease of false guilt....At the
root of false guilt is the idea that what you feel must be true."[6] If you feel guilty, you must be
guilty!

The philosopher Martin Buber underlined the difference between the Freudian notion of guilt,
based on internal conflicts, and existential guilt, based on actual harm done to others.[7]

Guilt is often associated with anxiety. In mania, according to Otto Fenichel, the patient succeeds in
applying to guilt "the defense mechanism of denial by overcompensation...re-enacts being a person
without guilt feelings."[8]

In psychological research, guilt can be measured by using questionnaires, such as the Differential
Emotions Scale (Izard's DES), or the Dutch Guilt Measurement Instrument.

Defenses

Defenses against feeling guilt can become an overriding aspect of one's personality.[9] The methods
that can be used to avoid guilt are multiple. They include:

1. Repression, usually used by the superego and ego against instinctive impulses, but on
occasion employed against the superego/conscience itself. [10] If the defence fails, then (in a
return of the repressed) one may begin to feel guilty years later for actions lightly committed
at the time.[11]
2. Projection is another defensive tool with wide applications. It may take the form of blaming
the victim: The victim of someone else's accident or bad luck may be offered criticism, the
theory being that the victim may be at fault for having attracted the other person's hostility.[12]
Alternatively, not the guilt, but the condemning agency itself, may be projected onto other
people, in the hope that they will look upon one's deeds more favorably than one's own
conscience (a process that verges on ideas of reference).[13]
3. Sharing a feeling of guilt, and thereby being less alone with it, is a motive force in both art
and joke-telling; while it is also possible to "borrow" a sense of guilt from someone who is
seen as in the wrong, and thereby assuage one's own.[14]
4. Self-harm may be used as an alternative to compensating the object of one's transgression

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perhaps in the form of not allowing oneself to enjoy opportunities open to one, or benefits
due, as a result of uncompensated guilt feelings.[15]

Behavioral responses

Feelings of guilt can prompt subsequent virtuous behavior. People who feel guilty may be more
likely to exercise restraint,[16] avoid self-indulgence,[17] and exhibit less prejudice.[18] Guilt
appears to prompt reparatory behaviors to alleviate the negative emotions that it engenders. People
appear to engage in targeted and specific reparatory behaviors toward the persons they wronged or
offended.[19]

Lack of guilt in psychopaths

Individuals high in psychopathy lack any true sense of guilt or remorse for harm they may have
caused others. Instead, they rationalize their behavior, blame someone else, or deny it outright.[20]
A person with psychopathy has a tendency to be harmful to his or herself and to others. They have
little ability to plan ahead for the future. An individual with psychopathy will never find themselves
at fault because they will do whatever it takes to benefit themselves without reservation. A person
that does not feel guilt or remorse would have no reason to find themselves at fault for something
that they did with the intention of hurting another person. To a person high in psychopathy, their
actions can always be rationalized to be the fault of another person.[21] This is seen by
psychologists as part of a lack of moral reasoning (in comparison with the majority of humans), an
inability to evaluate situations in a moral framework, and an inability to develop emotional bonds
with other people due to a lack of empathy.

Causes

Evolutionary theories

Some evolutionary psychologists theorize that guilt and shame helped maintain beneficial
relationships, such as reciprocal altruism.[22] If a person feels guilty when he harms another, or
even fails to reciprocate kindness, he is more likely not to harm others or become too selfish. In this
way, he reduces the chances of retaliation by members of his tribe, and thereby increases his
survival prospects, and those of the tribe or group. As with any other emotion, guilt can be
manipulated to control or influence others. As a highly social animal living in large groups that are
relatively stable, we need ways to deal with conflicts and events in which we inadvertently or
purposefully harm others. If someone causes harm to another, and then feels guilt and demonstrates
regret and sorrow, the person harmed is likely to forgive. Thus, guilt makes it possible to forgive,
and helps hold the social group together.

Social psychology theories

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When we see another person suffering, it can also cause us pain. This constitutes our powerful
system of empathy, which leads to our thinking that we should do something to relieve the suffering
of others. If we cannot help another, or fail in our efforts, we experience feelings of guilt. From the
perspective of group selection, groups that are made up of a high percentage of co-operators outdo
groups with a low percentage of co-operators in between-group competition. People who are more
prone to high levels of empathy-based guilt may be likely to suffer from anxiety and depression;
however, they are also more likely to cooperate and behave altruistically. This suggests that guilt-
proneness may not always be beneficial at the level of the individual, or within-group competition,
but highly beneficial in between-group competition.

Other theories

Another common notion is that guilt is assigned by social processes, such as a jury trial (i. e., that it
is a strictly legal concept). Thus, the ruling of a jury that O. J. Simpson or Julius Rosenberg was
"guilty" or "not innocent" is taken as an actual judgment by the whole society that they must act as
if they were so. By corollary, the ruling that such a person is "not guilty" may not be so taken, due
to the asymmetry in the assumption that one is assumed innocent until proven guilty, and prefers to
take the risk of freeing a guilty party over convicting innocents. Still othersoften, but not always,
theists of one type or anotherbelieve that the origin of guilt comes from violating universal
principles of right and wrong. In most instances, people who believe this also acknowledge that
even though there is proper guilt from doing 'wrong' instead of doing 'right', people endure all sorts
of guilty feelings which do not stem from violating universal moral principles.

Collective guilt
Collective guilt (or group guilt) is the unpleasant and often emotional reaction that results among a
group of individuals when it is perceived that the group illegitimately harmed members of another
group. It is often the result of sharing a social identity with others whose actions represent a threat
to the positivity of that identity. For an individual to experience collective guilt, he must identify
himself as a part of the in-group. This produces a perceptual shift from thinking of oneself in
terms of I and me to us or we.[23]

Cultural views
Traditional Japanese society, Korean society and Chinese culture[24] are sometimes said to be
"shame-based" rather than "guilt-based", in that the social consequences of "getting caught" are
seen as more important than the individual feelings or experiences of the agent (see the work of
Ruth Benedict). The same has been said of Ancient Greek society, a culture where, in Bruno Snell's
words, if "honour is destroyed the moral existence of the loser collapses."[25]

This may lead to more of a focus on etiquette than on ethics as understood in Western civilization,
leading some in Western civilizations to question why the word ethos was adapted from Ancient

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Greek with such vast differences in cultural norms. Christianity and Islam inherit most notions of
guilt from Judaism, Persian, and Roman ideas, mostly as interpreted through Augustine, who
adapted Plato's ideas to Christianity. The Latin word for guilt is culpa, a word sometimes seen in
law literature, for instance in mea culpa meaning "my fault (guilt)".

Etymology

Guilt, from O.E. gylt "crime, sin, fault, fine, debt", derived from O.E. gieldan "to pay for, debt".
The mistaken use for "sense of guilt" is first recorded in 1690. "Guilt by association" is first
recorded in 1941. "Guilty" is from O.E. gyltig, from gylt.

In literature

Guilt is a main theme in John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and
Punishment, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, William Shakespeare's play Macbeth,
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat", and many other works of literature.
In Sartre's The Flies, the Furies (in the form of flies) represent the morbid, strangling forces of
neurotic guilt which bind us to authoritarian and totalitarian power.[26]

Guilt is a major theme in many works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is an almost universal concern
of novelists who explore inner life and secrets.

In the Christian Bible

Guilt in the Christian Bible is not merely an emotional state but is a legal state of deserving
punishment. The Hebrew Bible does not have a unique word for guilt, but uses a single word to
signify: "sin, the guilt of it, the punishment due unto it, and a sacrifice for it."[27] The Greek New
Testament uses a word for guilt that means "standing exposed to judgment for sin" (e. g., Romans
3:19). In what Christians call the "Old Testament", Christians believe the Bible teaches that,
through sacrifice, one's sins can be forgiven (Judaism categorically rejects this idea, holding that
forgiveness of sin is exclusively through repentance, and the role of sacrifices was for atonement of
sins committed by accident or ignorance[1] (http://www.shamash.org/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq
/11-08-02.html)). The New Testament says that this forgiveness is given as written in 1 Corinthians
15:34: "3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our
sins according to the Scriptures, for that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day
according to the Scriptures." Some believe that the Old and New Testaments have differing
opinions on the expiation of guilt because the Old Testaments were subject to the Age of Law and
the New Testaments replace the Age of Law with the now current Age of Grace. However, both in
the Old Testament and the New Testament salvation was granted based on God's grace and
forgiveness (Gen 6:8; 19:19; Exo 33:1217; 34:67). Animal sacrifices were only a symbol of the
future sacrifice of Jesus Christ (Heb 10:14; 912). The whole world is guilty before God for
abandoning him and his ways (Rom 3:9). In Jesus Christ, God took upon himself the sins of the
world and died on the cross to pay our debt (Rom 6:23). Those who repent and accept the sacrifice

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of Jesus Christ for their sins, will be redeemed by God and thus not guilty before him. They will be
granted eternal life which will take effect when Jesus comes the second time (1 Thess 4:1318). In
contrast to surrounding nations which addressed their guilt with human sacrifice, the Israeli authors
of the Bible called that an abomination (1 Kings 11:7, Jer 32:35). The Bible agrees with pagan
cultures that guilt creates a cost that someone must pay (Heb 9:22). (This assumption was
expressed in the previous section, "Defences": "Guilty people punish themselves if they have no
opportunity to compensate the transgression that caused them to feel guilty. It was found that
self-punishment did not occur if people had an opportunity to compensate the victim of their
transgression.") But unlike pagan deities who demanded it be paid by humans, God, according to
the Bible, loved us enough to pay it Himself, as a good father would, while calling us His
"children" and calling Himself our "father" (Mat 5:45).

See also
Emotional blackmail Guilt culture Georges Bataille
Criminals from a sense of Catholic guilt Nietzsche
guilt Mea culpa
Guilt by association Jewish guilt
Collective guilt Guilty pleasure
German Guilt trip
collective guilt Postponement of guilt
Survivor guilt Self-blame
White guilt Shame culture

Further reading
Adam Phillips, 'Guilt', in On Flirtation (1994) pp. 138147
Nina Coltart, 'Sin and the Super-ego', in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1992)

References

1. "Guilt". Encyclopedia of Psychology (http://www.enotes.com/gale-psychology-encyclopedia/guilt). 2nd

ed. Ed. Bonnie R. Strickland. Gale Group, Inc., 2001. eNotes.com. 2006. 31 December 2007
2. Leslie J. Shapiro, LICSW. "Pathological guilt: A persistent yet overlooked treatment factor in obsessive-
compulsive disorder ". Aacp.com. Retrieved 27 November 2012.
3. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 11) pp. 3901
4. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (2008) p. 25
5. Alice Miller, The Drama of Being a Child (1995) pp. 99100
6. Parrott, pp. 1589
7. Buber, M. (May 1957). "Guilt and guilt feelings". Psychiatry. 20 (2): 11429. PMID 13441838.
8. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) pp. 40910
9. Otto Fenichel The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 496

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10. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 11)p. 393

11. Eric Berne, A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Penguin 1976) p. 191
12. The Pursuit of Health, June Bingham & Norman Tamarkin, M.D., Walker Press
13. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 165 and p. 293
14. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 165-6 and p. 496
15. Nelissen, R. M. A.; Zeelenberg, M. (2009). "When guilt evokes self-punishment: Evidence for the
existence of a dobby effect". Emotion. 9 (1): 118122. doi:10.1037/a0014540.
16. "Guilty pleasures and grim necessities: Affective attitudes in dilemmas of self-control.". APA PsycNET.
Retrieved 2015-10-13.
17. "The effects of nonconsciously priming emotion concepts on behavior.". APA PsycNET. Retrieved
2015-10-13.
18. Amodio, David M.; Devine, Patricia G.; Harmon-Jones, Eddie (2007-06-01). "A Dynamic Model of
Guilt Implications for Motivation and Self-Regulation in the Context of Prejudice". Psychological
Science. 18 (6): 524530. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01933.x. ISSN 0956-7976. PMID 17576266.
19. Cryder, Cynthia E.; Springer, Stephen; Morewedge, Carey K. (2012-05-01). "Guilty Feelings, Targeted
Actions". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 38 (5): 607618.
doi:10.1177/0146167211435796. ISSN 0146-1672. PMID 22337764.
20. Birket-Smith, Morten; Millon, Theodore; Simonsen, Erik; Davis, Roger E. (2002). "11. Psychopathy and
the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Widiger and Lynam". Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and
Violent Behavior. New York: The Guilford Press. pp. 1737. ISBN 1-57230-864-8.
21. Neumann, Craig S.; Kosson, David S.; Forth, Adelle E.; Hare, Robert D. (2013). "Factor structure of the
Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) in adolescent females". Psychological
Assessment. doi:10.1037/1040-3590.18.2.142.
22. Pallanti, S., Quercioli, L. (August 2000). "Shame and psychopathology". CNS Spectr. 5 (8): 2843.
PMID 18192938.
23. Branscombe, Nyla, R.; Bertjan Doosje (2004). Collective Guilt: International Perspectives. Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 0-521-52083-5.
24. Bill Brugger, China, Liberation and Transformation (1981) pp. 1819
25. Quoted in M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1967) p. 136
26. Robert Fagles trans., The Oresteia (Penguin 1981) p. 92
27. Owen, J. (1850). "Chapter 8". The Doctrine of Justification by Faith. London: Johnstone and Hunter.
p. 197.

External links
Tangney, J. P., Miller, R. S., Flicker, L., Barlow, D. H. Wikiquote has
(June 1996). "Are shame, guilt, and embarrassment quotations related to:
distinct emotions?". J Pers Soc Psychol. 70 (6): 125669. Guilt (emotion)
doi:10.1037/0022-3514.70.6.1256. PMID 8667166.
Guilt, unconscious sense of (http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/guilt-
unconscious-sense)
Michael Eigen, 'Guilt in an Age of Psychopathy' (http://www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com
/human_nature/eigen/part1.html)

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