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As a psychotherapist, guilt is one of the most common emotional experiences my patients grapple with. Guilt is commonly viewed as the feeling that emerges when you’ve done something wrong, when you’ve made a mistake or not acted as you would have hoped or done something that violates your own moral values. But this is a rather limited perspective on guilt that misses the greater potential guilt may serve in one’s mental life. In this brief presentation, I will attempt to shed light on how guilt can be used more productively if it is approached as an emotion that cues the onset of positive change.

 

Perhaps no other theorist has written more about guilt than Freud. According to Freud, guilt evolved over time throughout human evolution as a mental experience which contradicts, confronts, and comes into conflict with our innate drives for pleasure, aggression, and tension relief. Informed by cultural and religious values, by one’s family of origin, by teachers, etiquette, and the social mores of the time, guilt is mainly generated in the part of the mind Freud called the “superego.” When primitive states and desires — what Freud called the “id” and subsequently the “id derivatives” — emerge, they come into contact with superego restrictions. The notion of mental conflict for Freud involved the ongoing oppositional dynamic between id and superego, between desire and moral/religious restriction, between the devil and the angel.

 

Most people, however, only view guilt rather concretely. That is, when an individual feels guilt it must mean that he or she has done something wrong and is at fault and, well, should feel bad about it. That “feeling bad about it” is necessary to keep the individual in line and promote the urge to strive to do better, which for Freud was very important as it keeps us all on track and helps us act in accordance with a moral compass, some notion of what’s right and wrong, even if on occasion we want to blur the distinction between right and wrong.

 

It might be surprising to learn, however, that this perspective on guilt captures a rather limited range of actual guilt experiences. What I mean is that the source of guilt in the mind — the superego — rarely functions in a moderate and realistic way, i.e., generating an appropriate amount of guilt for the situation at hand. For most people, their superego is either too heightened (too intense) or, on the other end of the continuum, too lackadaisical (not intense enough). In the first instance, guilt generated by the superego about a particular situation is greater than that which the situation reasonably warrants; there is too much of a feeling of wrongness. In the second instance, not enough guilt is generated for what a situation warrants; there are not feelings of wrongness or not enough when there should be.

 

The latter situation, when not enough guilt is generated in the mind, captures the core feature of sociopaths and many persons with narcissistic personality tendencies. In this group of people, the superego is under-developed or may not even exist at all. This is the reason why psychopaths experience very little, if any, remorse for the victims of their crimes, and is also linked to psychopaths’ notable lack of physiological reactivity when in situations that would be profoundly stressful and traumatic for the average person.

 

But perhaps even more interesting is the larger contingent of people who possess the opposite issue: their superegos, often based on experiences in early childhood development, have been overly developed and consequently tend to generate guilt to an intensity that far surpasses what is reasonable to expect and/or tend to assign guilt to themselves about situations or events for which they are not responsible and certainly should not feel bad about it. In fact, often individuals like this take on the guilt that others should feel, resulting in their taking accountability for situations for which they are not accountable. This is a very common phenomenon among victims of child abuse and other forms of trauma in which victims may harbor profound guilt due to the belief that, in one way or another, they are responsible for prompting their perpetrators to act.

 

For those individuals whose superegos are primed to generate guilt in excess and/or at times when it is not relevant, life can be very painful. The ongoing experience of guilt can prompt numerous psychiatric conditions including anxiety and depression, as well as biased, self-punitive views of oneself as well as significantly low levels of self-esteem and self-confidence.

 

What I have found, though, in my psychotherapy practice, is that once patients begin to understand the dynamics of guilt, and their own hyper-intensively developed superego, they can begin to use guilt more effectively. This centers on the realization that when guilt emerges, often it is emerging for the wrong reason and implies that the person is doing something which is actually useful and good.

 

For example, if a woman has felt guilty about communicating her emotional needs, she has likely lived for a long time rarely, if ever, expressing them. Her restraining herself has probably warded off the experience of guilt or, when she has expressed her needs, the arising of guilt holds her in check and inhibits further expressions of her needs.

 

However, if she is in psychotherapy, she may come to learn that expressing her emotional needs is not only not wrong but necessary, even highly important, for her and those with whom she has relationships. As a result, she may gradually begin to express her emotional needs more and more. And, as you might imagine, when she does so, she will likely begin to be more and more troubled by the emergence of guilt. In her mind, guilt is a mechanism that inadvertently has locked her in a status quo and inhibited any real significant change in her life. The shift that needs to occur for her is that the emergence of guilt is no longer perceived as an indicator of wrongful action, but as a sign that previous restraints are loosening and that new freedoms are possible.

 

Although it may be a long and arduous process, psychotherapy does often help influence people to take this new perspective on guilt and appreciate how the mind is so primed to activate guilt and, consequently, obstruct growth. When this happens, an extraordinary transition occurs. Whereas guilt was once perceived as an accurate appraiser of wrongful action, it can now be understood as an overly-developed mechanism of human evolution whose emergence paradoxically signals new and appropriate expressions of one’s authentic self.