Guilt (emotion)
Guilt is an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation.
Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse as well as shame.
Guilt is an important factor in perpetuating obsessive–compulsive disorder symptoms.
Psychology
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. 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 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." For his later explicator, Lacan, guilt was the inevitable companion of the signifying subject who acknowledged normality in the form of the Symbolic order.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." 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." 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.
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."
In psychological research, guilt can be measured by using questionnaires, such as the Differential Emotions Scale, or the Dutch Guilt Measurement Instrument.
Defenses
Defenses against feeling guilt can become an overriding aspect of one's personality. The methods that can be used to avoid guilt are multiple. They include:- Repression, usually used by the superego and ego against instinctive impulses, but on occasion employed against the superego/conscience itself. If the defence fails, then one may begin to feel guilty years later for actions lightly committed at the time.
- 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. 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 .
- 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.
- Self-harm may be used as an alternative to compensating the object of one's transgression – perhaps in the form of not allowing oneself to enjoy opportunities open to one, or benefits due, as a result of uncompensated guilt feelings.
Behavioral responses
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. A person with psychopathy has a tendency to be harmful to himself 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. This is seen by psychologists as part of a lack of moral reasoning, 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. 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 highly social animals living in large, relatively stable groups, humans need ways to deal with conflicts and events in which they 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
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. 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 others—often, but not always, theists of one type or another—believe 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 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’.”Comparison with shame
Guilt and shame are two closely related concepts, but they have key differences that should not be overlooked. Cultural Anthropologist Ruth Benedict describes shame as the result of a violation of cultural or social values, while guilt is conjured up internally when one’s personal morals are violated. To put it more simply, the primary difference between shame and guilt is the source that creates the emotion. Shame arises from a real or imagined negative perception coming from others and guilt arises from a negative perception of one’s own thoughts or actions.Psychoanalyst Helen B. Lewis stated that, "The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus." An individual can still possess a positive perception of themselves while also feeling guilt for certain actions or thoughts they took part in. Contrary to guilt, Shame has a more inclusive focus on the individual as a whole. Fossum and Mason's ideas clearly outline this idea in their book Facing Shame. They state that "While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.”
Shame can almost be described as looking at yourself unfavorably through the eyes of others. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman portrays this idea by stating that "Shame is an acutely self-conscious state in which the self is 'split,' imagining the self in the eyes of the other; by contrast, in guilt the self is unified.” Both shame and guilt are directly related to self-perception, only shame causes the individual to account for the cultural and social beliefs of others.
Paul Gilbert talks about the powerful hold that shame can take over someone in his article Evolution, Social Roles, and the Differences in Shame and Guilt. He says that “The fear of shame and ridicule can be so strong that people will risk serious physical injury or even death to avoid it. One of the reasons for this is because shame can indicate serious damage to social acceptance and a breakdown in a variety of social relationships. The evolutionary root of shame is in a self-focused, social threat system related to competitive behavior and the need to prove oneself acceptable/desirable to others” Guilt on the other hand evolved from a place of Care-Giving and avoidance of any act that harms others.
Cultural views
Traditional Japanese society, Korean society and Chinese culture 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. 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."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 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 ".
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 represent the morbid, strangling forces of neurotic guilt which bind us to authoritarian and totalitarian power.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.