Innocent Until Proven Otherwise
So, yesterday I left you thinking about what gives most humankind the ability to feel guilt, and I’ve done a bit of reading since then. Something that caught my eye, and that I didn’t write about, is the fact that Sigmund Freud wrote about guilt saying that it was “the struggle between the parental imprinting of ego & superego.� Guilt is, thanks to Freud, a common subject matter within both psychiatry and psychology (physicians often associate guilt with depression).
Now after reading some about Freud (I won’t bore you with his oh-so-thorough explanation of ego & parental imprinting, unless you ask me about it in the contest!) I moved on to where guilt comes from in the eyes of social-science. I’ve noticed that when I’m feeling guilty, about anything, I am less likely to stand up for myself. I’m less likely to tell someone how I’m truly feeling and even if I shouldn’t be feeling guilty, I notice myself pulling in. This may be a form of social control – those who feel guilt are less likely to cause a scene. If the leaders in society cause their people to feel guilt, those people are more likely to follow blindly. Probably not the best thing.
There is another school of thought that guilt is among the list of “rational human emotions.� This may mean that it’s selected by evolution to help aid in the advancement of humankind. If a person feels bad for killing their brother, they are probably less likely to kill their other brother. This also decreases the person’s chance of being disliked by the rest of the people around him. Both of these examples show that guilt can be manipulated to control and influence the population (for good & bad).
Tomorrow I am going to look at two other ways people look at guilt and see what we can get from that!
mental and emotional health, guilt, Freud, social control, psychology
August 16th, 2007 at 10:41 am
It must be that people feeling guilty get depressed, and not necesarrily the other way around. It has been a rare occasion that I have felt guilt, yet I’ve been chronically depressed most of my life. I don’t really understand guilt. I mean, if you act in good conscience you can totally avoid that emotion.
August 16th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Interesting. So how come guilt doesn’t prevent people from being assholes?