Guilt is a moral emotion 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. Feeling guilty is unpleasant for people while they experience it, but it can prompt positive, pro-social efforts to restore relationships and make amends. When understood as a collection of basic emotions, guilt is composed of self-directed anger, sadness for the victim, anxiety, and fear (e.g., of damaging or losing relationships with individuals and society). Guilt is closely related to the concepts of remorse, regret, and shame. Guilt is an important factor in perpetuating obsessive–compulsive disorder symptoms.
Psychology 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. Freud rejected the role of God and blamed the existence of guilt instead on the individual's own "fear of loss of love" and relationships, beginning in childhood, with a fear that parents could reject the child. The child turns this fear inward, to create self-directed anger. For Freud's later explicator, Jacques 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." 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. People appear to engage in targeted and specific reparatory behaviors toward the persons they wronged or offended. This can restore the relationships that were damaged by the actions that produced the guilty feelings.
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