Guilt and its associated causes, advantages, and disadvantages 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 the
conscience, or what
Sigmund Freud called the
superego.
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." Therapists recognized similar feelings of guilt in individuals that survived traumatic events that involved a loved one perishing, called
survivor's guilt. 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 (Izard's DES), or the
Dutch Guilt Measurement Instrument.
Defenses According to psychoanalytic theory, 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 (in a return of the repressed) 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 (a process that verges on
ideas of reference). • 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 Guilt proneness is a personality trait that reflects a tendency to feel negative emotions about one's own misdeeds, even when they are not known by others. Guilt proneness is also an important predictor of
trustworthiness. The sense of responsibility of guilt-prone people is strong and this makes them trustworthy. Guilt proneness is reliably associated with moral character. Similarly, feelings of guilt can prompt subsequent
virtuous behavior. People who feel guilty may be more likely to exercise restraint, avoid self-indulgence, and exhibit less prejudice. Guilt prompts reparatory behaviors to alleviate the unpleasant
negative emotions that it engenders. This can restore the relationships that were damaged by the actions that produced the guilty feelings. People with psychopathy have a tendency to be harmful to themselves 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 (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. One study on psychopaths found that, under certain circumstances, they could willfully empathize with others, and that their empathic reaction initiated the same way it does for controls. Psychopathic criminals were brain-scanned while watching videos of a person harming another individual. The psychopaths' empathic reaction initiated the same way it did for controls when they were instructed to empathize with the harmed individual, and the area of the brain relating to pain was activated when the psychopaths were asked to imagine how the harmed individual felt. The research suggests psychopaths can switch empathy on at will, which would enable them to be both callous and charming. The team who conducted the study say they do not know how to transform this willful empathy into the spontaneous empathy most people have, though they propose it might be possible to rehabilitate psychopaths by helping them to activate their "empathy switch". Others suggested that it remains unclear whether psychopaths' experience of empathy was the same as that of controls, and also questioned the possibility of devising therapeutic interventions that would make the empathic reactions more automatic. Neuroscientist
Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues showed that subjects with damage to the
ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to empathically feel their way to moral answers, and that when confronted with moral dilemmas, these brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers, leading Damasio to conclude that the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when they were confronted by a difficult issue – in this case as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city – these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains. According to
Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California, one of this study's implications is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people: "Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse. Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does that mean they should be held to different standards of accountability?" such as
reciprocal altruism. If a person feels guilty when he harms another or 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. == Collective guilt ==