Abstract
This chapter complements the preceding chapter on shame, yet it shows how the dynamically related emotion of guilt has different evolutionary roots, different effects on consciousness, and different consequences for personal and social adjustment. Lewis holds that it was the shift in the conception of guilt as an essential aspect of one’s relationship with God to its conception as a signal of violation of internalized cultural values that brought it within the pale of science. With this secularization of the concept of guilt, social scientists began studying its enculturation and socialization, and psychologists and psychiatrists began studying how its presence in excess produces psychological disorders.
There’s a limit to the guilt you can feel and the forgiveness and the pity you can take! You have to begin blaming someone else too. I got so sometimes when she’d kiss me it was like she did it on purpose to humiliate me, as if she’d spat in my face.
Hicke’s soliloquy in the final scene of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
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Lewis, H.B. (1979). Guilt in Obsession and Paranoia. In: Izard, C.E. (eds) Emotions in Personality and Psychopathology. Emotions, Personality, and Psychotherapy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2892-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2892-6_14
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