Lecture
The anxiety of guilt and condemnation is an emotional state associated with the feeling of a guilty conscience and inner condemnation for certain actions, decisions, or even thoughts. These emotions can be powerful and can have a serious effect on a person's psychological well-being. Here are some characteristics of the anxiety of guilt and condemnation:
The feeling of guilt: A person considers himself guilty when he judges his own actions to be morally wrong, harmful, or damaging. The person feels pangs of conscience and may feel that he must somehow atone for his actions.
The feeling of condemnation: This is the inner condemnation of oneself for one's own actions or situations. A person may consider himself bad, unworthy, or incapable because of certain actions or decisions.
Excessive self-criticism: People suffering from the anxiety of guilt and condemnation can be excessively self-critical and demanding of themselves. They may set unrealistic standards and judge their own behaviour harshly.
Physical and psychological symptoms: These emotions can be accompanied by physical symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia, headache, and other manifestations of stress. Psychologically, the person may suffer from depression, anxiety disorders, and low self-esteem.
Isolation: The feeling of guilt and condemnation can lead to isolation. The person may try to avoid contact with others, out of fear of the condemnation or resentment of those around him.
Coping with the anxiety of guilt and condemnation can take time and effort. It is important to understand that all people make mistakes and commit unwise acts from time to time. Here are a few ways of coping with these emotions:
Self-compassion: The practice of self-compassion helps soften criticism and condemning thoughts directed at oneself. Accept yourself as you are, and understand that mistakes are part of the human experience.
Psychotherapy: Therapy such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can help a person get to the roots of the feeling of guilt and condemnation and develop strategies for coping with them.
Working on self-esteem: Develop a positive self-image and self-respect. Acknowledge your achievements and successes.
Self-forgiveness: The ability to forgive yourself for mistakes made and to draw lessons from them can help reduce the feeling of guilt and condemnation.
Communication: Talk with close friends or a professional counsellor about your emotions and experiences.
In existential psychology, “guilt” has a different meaning than in traditional psychology, where it is designated as an emotional state associated with the experiencing of a wrongful act, a sense of one's own badness. Existential psychology (the perspective of I. Yalom) adds an important dimension to the concept of guilt. The full acceptance of responsibility for one's actions expands the boundaries of guilt and reduces the possibilities of escape. A person bears guilt not only for offences against other people, or against moral or social rules. He bears guilt for offences against himself. A person's being is not simply given to him — it is presented to him as a demand. A person is responsible for himself, for his own being. A person is obliged to answer the question of what he has made of himself. The person judges himself. The person appears in two roles: he is both judge and defendant. This situation gives rise to anxiety which, in a relative sense, is the anxiety of guilt, and in an absolute sense, is the anxiety of self-rejection and condemnation. A person, in his essence, is “finite freedom” — the capacity of a person to define himself through decision-making within the contingencies given by his finitude. Within these limits, a person is destined to make of himself what he ought to become, that is, to fulfil his destiny. But how is one to learn one's potential, one's destiny? How is one to learn one's potential by encountering its manifestation? How do we know that we have lost our way? Through guilt. Existential guilt is a positive, constructive
force, a counsellor that leads us back to ourselves.
Yet a person is capable of acting against his own
destiny, of contradicting his own essential being.
No one has depicted betrayal of oneself more
precisely than F. Kafka. His novel “The Trial” is devoted to this, which we describe in more
detail in the appendix. Analysing this novel, I. Yalom draws
a very precise conclusion: “The villager in Kafka's novel was guilty — not only in
that he led an unlived life, waited for permission from another, failed to take possession of his
own life, did not pass through the gate meant for him alone; he was
guilty also in that he did not accept his guilt, did not use it as
a guide inward, did not confess ‘unconditionally’ — an act as a result
of which the gate would have ‘swung open.’
Erich Fromm characterized the state of the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s fiction as follows: “In
the human sense he was almost dead, but he could go on living the life
of a bank clerk exactly as before, for this occupation had no
relation whatsoever to his human existence.”
“Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself,” wrote J.-
P. Sartre. Our life is nothing other than what we make of it.
Life is given to man as a possibility for self-realization.
The Feeling of Guilt.
There are several points of view on the problem of the feeling of guilt.
The understanding of the feeling of guilt goes back, as does much in contemporary
practical psychology oriented toward psychological assistance, to
S. Freud. According to classical theory, neurotic guilt
arises as a result of a conflict between the superego and infantile
sexual and aggressive wishes.
In existential psychology, guilt is defined as
an emotional state connected with the experiencing of wrongful
actions, an uncomfortable state characterized by anxiety in
combination with a sense of one’s own “badness” (I. Yalom).
Our culture instills in us a feeling of guilt when we
find ourselves in a position of dependency.
Three kinds of guilt are distinguished. The first two fit
the definition given above and differ only in the degree
of “offense” toward another person or animal. These are
neurotic guilt and authentic guilt.
Neurotic guilt arises from imagined violations
of rules, imagined harm, minor transgressions against another person,
and parental and social prohibitions.
Authentic (real) guilt is caused by the actual infliction
of physical or moral harm on another person, an actual
violation of social and parental norms and rules.
Some authors distinguish developmental guilt, which forms in childhood when a child feels inadequate
to the demands of adults and parents. The child cannot, in principle,
measure up — he has a different world, no less valuable than the world of adults,
but adults often forget this, as if they had never been children.
The guilt of the terminally ill, which results from several
causes: 1) they often express the suspicion that their illness and their fate are
a deserved punishment and the consequence of their own actions; 2)
they accept, to a greater or lesser degree, the role
of an extremely dependent child; 3) the dying person feels that
he forces the living to face the inevitability of death, for
which they must hate him; 4) the sick person sometimes realizes that
he envies those who remain alive, and that he wishes (this wish is rarely
acknowledged) that his spouse, parent, child, or friend had died in
his place.
Existential (ontological) guilt offers a different reading
of this phenomenon. A person bears responsibility not so much for violations
of social prohibitions, and not so much for real or imagined
offenses against other people, but above all for “offenses”
against himself. What is this crime for which Kafka sent
his hero to the scaffold? And who is this judge who passed such a terrible
sentence?
Heidegger wrote: “to be guilty also implies ‘being
responsible for,’ that is, being the source, or the author, or, at
the very least, the accidental cause of something.”
Anthropology, in its existential reading, asserts that
a person, within the bounds of a freedom that is, in essence, contingent, is called to make of
himself what he ought to become, must fulfill his purpose,
and realize his destiny. However, a person possesses the capacity
to act contrary to the moral imperative called upon
to actualize what is potentially inherent in him. The person then
enters into contradiction with his original being, since he does not
fulfill his purpose.
Existential guilt — is a positive, constructive force,
a counselor that brings us back to ourselves.
The capacity to relate to oneself critically is the most important
advantage of man over all earthly creatures — noted
the Russian existential philosopher V. S. Solovyov. He wrote: “Of all
earthly creatures, man alone can relate to himself critically —
not in the sense of mere dissatisfaction with this or that aspect of his situation or
actions (this is possible for other animals as well), nor in the sense
of a vague, undefined feeling of anguish characteristic of all “groaning
creation,” but in the sense of a conscious, negative evaluation of the very manner
of his being and the fundamental course of his life, as not corresponding to what ought to be.” It is here that our divided self passes judgment and experiences a feeling of guilt, if the verdict is not one of acquittal. A person judges himself by the laws of shared knowing, by the laws of so-vest’ (in Russian, sovest’, ‘conscience,’ is literally ‘co-knowledge’). It follows that a person without conscience is not one who has done something bad to me, but one who has done something bad to himself yet does not understand this — he has not developed reflection on his own behavior, the expression of his own feelings, his own thoughts; he does not think critically. He is always right, first and foremost in relation to himself, to his own actions. A person without conscience – is a person without any real possibility of improving, developing, and, ultimately, of moving along the path of realizing himself.
A living, clear, and precise conscience is the only thing that gives a person
the capacity to resist the effects of the existential vacuum —
conformism and totalitarianism.
V. Frankl
The anxiety of guilt can lead us to complete self-renunciation, to
the experience of being condemned and sentenced. The sentence presents
itself before us in the form of despair over the loss of one’s own purpose.
Some authors define this loss of one’s own “self” as
“psychic death,” believing that it often occurs already in childhood.
The anxiety of guilt and condemnation can be complex, but with appropriate support and effort, one can learn to cope with these emotions and move forward.
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