Guilt (emotion)

• 1. Introduction

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  Guilt is the moral emotion that arrives when a person believes they have crossed their own standards of conduct, or violated a shared moral rule, and that they bear real responsibility for it. The belief need not even be accurate. A person can feel guilty over something that was never truly their fault. While it lasts, guilt is unpleasant. Yet that discomfort can push someone toward repair, toward mending a relationship or making amends. The Latin word for it is culpa, surviving in the phrase mea culpa, meaning my fault. So what is this feeling actually made of? Why do some people carry it for a lifetime while others, the psychopaths among us, seem to feel none of it at all? And why have so many writers, philosophers, and religious traditions circled the same uneasy question of what to do with the weight of a wrong?

• 2. The Anatomy Of A Feeling

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  Self-directed anger, sadness for the victim, anxiety, and fear: when guilt is understood as a bundle of basic emotions, these are its components. The fear is often specific, a fear of damaging or losing one's relationships with other people and with society. Sigmund Freud located the engine of this feeling in the conscience, what he called the superego. He rejected the idea that God was its source. Instead he blamed the individual's own fear of loss of love, a fear that begins in childhood with the dread that one's parents might reject the child. The child turns that fear inward, and it becomes self-directed anger. Freud's later explicator Jacques Lacan saw guilt as the inevitable companion of the speaking subject who accepts normality through what he called the Symbolic order. Alice Miller described people who suffer all their lives from an oppressive sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. No argument, she wrote, can overcome these feelings, because they begin in life's earliest period and draw their intensity from there. Les Parrott named a related affliction the disease of false guilt, whose root is the idea that what you feel must be true. The same feeling has another face. Therapists recognized it in people who survived traumatic events in which a loved one perished, and they gave it a name: survivor's guilt.

• 3. Hiding From The Conscience

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  Repression is the first line of defense the mind raises against guilt, according to psychoanalytic theory. The superego and ego usually deploy it against instinctive impulses, but it can be turned against the conscience itself. When repression fails, the feeling can return years later, so that a person begins to feel guilty for actions taken lightly at the time. Projection offers another route of escape. It can take the form of blaming the victim, treating someone struck by accident or bad luck as somehow at fault for attracting another's hostility. Alternatively, the condemning agency itself can be projected onto other people, in the hope that they will judge one's deeds more kindly than one's own conscience does. Sharing a feeling of guilt is a motive force in both art and joke-telling, a way of being less alone with it. It is even possible to borrow guilt from someone seen as in the wrong, and so ease one's own. Self-harm can serve as a substitute for compensating the person one wronged. It may appear as a refusal to enjoy opportunities or benefits one is due, a private penalty paid out of uncompensated guilt. Philosopher Martin Buber drew a line between the Freudian guilt rooted in internal conflict and existential guilt, which rests on actual harm done to others.

• 4. The Trustworthy And The Cold

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  Guilt proneness is a personality trait: the tendency to feel bad about one's own misdeeds even when no one else knows about them. It turns out to be a reliable predictor of trustworthiness. The sense of responsibility in guilt-prone people is strong, and that strength is what makes them trustworthy. The trait is reliably associated with moral character. Feelings of guilt can prompt virtuous behavior afterward. People who feel guilty may be more likely to exercise restraint, avoid self-indulgence, and show less prejudice. Guilt also drives reparation. People appear to direct specific repairs toward the very persons they wronged or offended, which can restore the relationships their actions damaged. Individuals high in psychopathy stand at the opposite pole. They lack any true sense of guilt or remorse for the harm they cause. Instead they rationalize, blame someone else, or deny it outright. They tend to be harmful to themselves and others, with little ability to plan ahead. To such a person, every action can be reframed as someone else's fault. Psychologists see this as part of a broader failure: an inability to evaluate situations in a moral framework, and an inability to form emotional bonds because empathy is missing.

• 5. The Empathy Switch

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  Psychopathic criminals were placed in a brain scanner and shown videos of one person harming another. When the researchers instructed them to empathize with the victim, their empathic reaction began the same way it did in control subjects. The brain area linked to pain lit up when they were asked to imagine how the harmed person felt. The study suggested that psychopaths can switch empathy on at will, which would let them be both callous and charming. The team behind the work said they did not know how to turn that willful empathy into the spontaneous kind most people have, though they proposed it might be possible to rehabilitate psychopaths by helping them activate their empathy switch. Others were more cautious. They questioned whether the psychopaths' experience of empathy was really the same as the controls', and whether any therapy could make those reactions automatic. Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues studied subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These patients could not feel their way to moral answers. Confronted with a dilemma, such as whether to shoot down a hijacked passenger plane before it strikes a city, they reached cold, end-justifies-the-means conclusions without the anguish that affects people with normally functioning brains. Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, drew an unsettling implication. Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse, he noted, and people relying only on reasoning find it harder to navigate moral thickets. He asked whether that means they should be held to different standards of accountability.

• 6. Why Guilt Survived

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  Reciprocal altruism is the survival logic that some evolutionary psychologists place beneath guilt and shame. If a person feels guilty when he harms another or fails to return a kindness, he is less likely to harm others or to grow too selfish. That restraint reduces the chance of retaliation from members of his tribe, raising the survival odds of both the individual and the group. Humans are highly social animals living in large, relatively stable groups, and they need ways to handle conflict and the harm they cause one another. When someone causes harm and then shows guilt, regret, and sorrow, the person harmed is more likely to forgive. Guilt, in this view, makes forgiveness possible and helps hold the social group together. The same machinery can scale up to whole groups. Collective guilt is the uneasy, often emotional reaction that runs through a group when its members perceive that the group has illegitimately harmed another group. It tends to follow from sharing a social identity with others whose actions threaten the positivity of that identity. For an individual to feel it, he must identify himself as part of the in-group. That identification produces a perceptual shift, from thinking in terms of I and me to thinking in terms of us and we.

• 7. Guilt And Its Mirror

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  Cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict drew the dividing line: shame is the result of violating cultural or social values, while guilt is conjured internally when one's personal morals are breached. Shame arises from a real or imagined negative perception coming from others. Guilt arises from a negative perception of one's own thoughts or actions. Psychoanalyst Helen Block Lewis put the difference more sharply. In shame, she said, the self is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative judgment; the thing done is. A person can keep a positive view of themselves while still feeling guilt for particular acts. Shame, by contrast, takes in the whole individual. Fossum and Mason wrote in their book Facing Shame that guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, while shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman described shame as an acutely self-conscious state in which the self is split, imagining itself in the eyes of another, whereas in guilt the self stays unified. Paul Gilbert, in his article on evolution and the differences in shame and guilt, noted how powerful shame can be. The fear of shame and ridicule, he wrote, can be so strong that people will risk serious physical injury or even death to avoid it. Its evolutionary root lies in a self-focused social threat system tied to competition and the need to prove oneself acceptable to others. Guilt, he argued, evolved instead from care-giving and the avoidance of acts that harm others.

• 8. Cultures, Books, And Bibles

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  Traditional Japanese, Korean, and Chinese cultures are sometimes called shame-based rather than guilt-based, because the social consequences of getting caught matter more than the agent's private feelings. Ruth Benedict's work sits behind that distinction. The same has been said of Ancient Greek society, where, in Bruno Snell's words, if honour is destroyed the moral existence of the loser collapses. This can shift emphasis toward etiquette rather than ethics as understood in Western civilization. Christianity and Islam inherited most of their notions of guilt from Judaism and from Persian and Roman ideas, largely as filtered through Augustine, who adapted Plato to Christianity. In literature the feeling is everywhere. Guilt is a main theme in John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. In Sartre's The Flies, the Furies appear as flies, the strangling forces of neurotic guilt that bind people to authoritarian power. Nathaniel Hawthorne returned to guilt again and again. Epicurus had taken a different angle centuries earlier. In his Principal Doctrines, he taught that guilt can be diagnosed by its signs, manifesting as a constant fear of detection from secretly doing something contrary to an agreement not to harm or be harmed. Since he rejected supernatural claims, his simplest remedy was to avoid the antisocial act in the first place. When guilt was unavoidable, Epicurean guides recommended confession to purge the character, a practice that Norman DeWitt, author of St Paul and Epicurus, argued the early Christian communities later took up. In the Christian Bible, guilt is not merely emotional but a legal state of deserving punishment. The Hebrew Bible has no unique word for it, using a single word for sin, its guilt, its punishment, and the sacrifice for it. The Greek New Testament uses a word meaning standing exposed to judgment for sin. The word itself traveled from the Old English gylt, meaning crime, sin, fault, fine, or debt, possibly from gieldan, to pay for. Its sense as an inner feeling of guilt appears in 1690, and guilt by association was first recorded in 1941.