Herant Katchadourian, emeritus professor of psychiatry and human biology at Stanford University, has taught over 20,000 students over the years but closed his teaching career with a seminar on guilt. “Frankly, I didn’t know that students would be interested in the topic. It’s gloomy and heavy,” he said. “But they were.” The class led him to write Guilt: The Bite of Conscience
Q. You mention in your book that even in the virtual world Second Life, guilt exists. This seems to suggest that guilt is innate, or something we need to interact with others. Where does guilt come from?
A. I hear two questions. One is the fundamental question of where does guilt come from, and the second is about this virtual world, Second Life. The basic premise of the book is that guilt, first of all, is part of our evolutionary heritage. We are born with the capacity for empathy, and that’s the concept that evolutionary psychologists have now written many, many books about. It’s a hot topic now. Perhaps the best comparison would be to language: communication begins among higher animals, but human beings have the capacity for language. We are born with the capacity to speak, but we have to be taught the particular language. If someone doesn’t teach us a particular language, then the capacity to speak is wasted. Similarly, we have a capacity to feel guilty, and the way we feel guilt is taught like a language. There are different reasons why people feel guilty, although, if you look across cultures and across time, the basic reasons are fairly fundamental. They have to do with how your actions impact the lives of other people you care about or have to live with.
You begin with this premise that guilt is something innate. Then of course, the particular social setting in which we’re born and raised teaches us the language of guilt, why to feel guilty and when and how and so on. So you have the standard combination of a biological underpinning and a social and cultural elaboration. That of course results in a huge, very long history of mostly religious approaches to guilt-not so much focusing on the subjective aspect of feeling guilty, which is what preoccupies psychology and psychiatry, but guilt as culpability. Being guilty-not just feeling guilty. There are many common ways in which religions condemn certain behavior, both in an active sense of being guilty for doing something, or feeling guilty for not doing what you should.
The work of moral philosophers is the secular counterpart of this. I focus on four major thinkers in the book. Then there is a final chapter which deals with guilt in the law. That is something that affects everybody’s life. You may not want to have anything to do with the religious and secular perspectives of guilt, but we’re all subject to law. The law is concerned with determining if the accused is proven guilty or not guilty in a court of law (without addressing the question of innocence, as such).
I discovered rather late when I was working on this book that there is this virtual world, Second Life, and large numbers of people seem to spend a tremendous amount of time with their avatars. This is an expansion of our fantasy lives, which of course we’ve had as long as we’ve been human. What’s different about it is that you are allowed to do and say things you would not be permitted to in real life. Does this create a guilt-free world in which to indulge your fantasies, or do we bring our inhibitions and guilt into the virtual world?
Q. The language comparison you use is interesting. Can you elaborate? How is guilt like a language, and what are the similarities and differences across cultures?
A. We are using a metaphor when we discuss language – although there is a very fascinating prospect that perhaps the capacity to feel guilty, and certainly to express guilt, is intimately tied with the capacity to speak. It’s both a metaphor and, well, possibly an actual association. But pursuing it primarily as a metaphor, every language has words for father and mother, it also has words that express feelings of guilt, shame and regret. There are a number of similarities, as well as differences in what these words express. There are also some rules, like a universal grammar that underlies all languages. In that sense you could say guilt has a similar universal structure exists with respect to guilt underneath the differences across cultures and across time. Particularly if you believe in an evolutionary basis for guilt, it could not be otherwise.
But there is also tremendous variation in how guilt is experienced and expressed in the literature of different cultures. The same is true for similarities and differences across religions. I focus on the six major religions – chronologically, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the West, and in the East Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. None of these say it is OK to kill your parents or harm people who are part of your group. There is a great deal of similarity also when it comes to sexual matters and human relationships. But you begin to see differences if you take the monotheistic religions as a unit, and the Asian religions as another unit.
Let’s use Christianity as an example, because it has the sharpest focus on guilt. Guilt seems to be the primary religious-based impulse that keeps you on the straight moral path. In Asian religions, the emphasis seems to be on shame. What is the difference between guilt and shame? In the Western traditions, and there is no common agreement on this, but generally, guilt pertains to crossing a certain line, doing something you shouldn’t. Shame is more about the failure to live up to a certain standard. That’s a shorthand description of the difference. You could say that the reason there is this distinction between West and East is due to the fact that in the West, we have a sense of the human being as autonomous and independent, and your worth is essentially a reflection of the kind of person you are. In the Eastern context, your identity as an individual is not as autonomous, but is defined by your family and larger cultural relationships. What confuses this, and I am oversimplifying, is that all the literature we have, or at least I could find about guilt and shame comes from the work of Western scholars. Now some scholars are starting to say that we’ve distorted the picture; for instance, what is meant by shame in Confucianism is far more complex than we tend to imagine in Western culture. Shame is used in a larger sense which in many ways subsumes what we call guilt.
Of course, you can extend these differences further. People in the same culture or religion have a different experience of guilt based on their own personal psychological makeup-it becomes difficult to say this is how Jews feel guilt or this is how Catholics feel guilt.
Q. How has psychology changed our conceptions of guilt over the last century? Has it made us think of guilt as a bad thing?
A. Typically, psychiatrists have been concerned with guilt in pathological terms. When guilt is excessive, it becomes essentially a form of mental illness. Guilt has associations with being depressed as well as with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. By the same token, lack of guilt, or a dysfunctional conscience, results in people becoming psychopaths. Psychologists began to study guilt more from a controlled, experimental perspective. Trying to study guilt in a more scientific way, if you wish, quantifying it. Over the last 20 or 25 years, at least, some psychologists have claimed that contrary to the dominant view in psychiatry and in our culture generally that thinks of guilt as a damaging emotion, shame is in fact the more damaging emotion. I go into this in some detail in the book. Clinical psychologists in particular now deal with guilt in a somewhat different way than traditional psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. There is also a general tendency, at least in popular psychology, to treat guilt as a bad thing. This is incidentally not just a question of psychology, but especially after the 1960s and 70s, there has been a general reaction in our culture – and perhaps an overreaction – to what was seen as the oppressive use of guilt in earlier times and in particular religions.
Q. We haven’t touched on some other forms of guilt you discuss in your book, like collective or existential guilt. What’s the social purpose of this sort of guilt? It seems, in some cases, unnecessary or unhelpful.
A. That is very baffling, because that is what I call guilt without transgression. It goes contrary to the most fundamental linkage between a transgression and a consequent bad feeling. These are lumped together under guilt without transgression although they are quite different from each other. Survivor guilt, as you know, is for instance when there is a fire and one parent and two children are burned to death, and the other parent escapes. There is nothing he or she could have done, but he feels terrible, and asks, why did I survive? There is a huge amount of literature on this from survivors of concentration camps and so on. I go into this in the book-it’s not as arbitrary and irrational as you may think.
If you move to collective guilt, this involves feeling responsible for something that the group you belong to has done. This can seem irrational too – why should I feel guilty if things were done before I was born? What possible responsibility can I have? The social utility of that is that groups that do harms to others incur a certain debt. Therefore it becomes necessary, sometimes, that the successors of the wrongdoers sort of continue to pay this debt. In some ways, it seems just. And at the same time, it makes people who really were not personally involved hostages to what their predecessors did.
The most enigmatic is existential guilt. Kafka is a very good example of this. It gets very difficult to put your arms around existential guilt. It’s feeling guilty for simply being human. How can you feel guilty for that? What’s the moral transgression there? It is fascinating. It adds a subtle, different way of looking at guilt than the government-issue, standard way of saying, this is what guilt is. It has fallen out of favor now – it was much more popular in the 1950s.
Q. Is existential guilt something like, say, feeling guilty for being American because we’re privileged?
A. That is just a particular variety – feeling guilty because of positive inequity. You look at the people who are disadvantaged, and the disparity between your advantage and their disadvantage makes you feel guilty. When I was teaching my seminar on guilt [at Stanford], I used to have my students provide anonymously a description of one episode of guilt and one episode of shame in their lives. One year, I was astounded that the most common cause for feeling guilty was being at Stanford. I thought people felt guilty because they didn’t get into Stanford – that they didn’t work hard enough. These students felt guilty for being there. This could apply to any college or university. One reason for this guilt is, and this is very much a middle class issue; if you are rich, you don’t care. If you’re poor, you get student aid. But you’re middle class, you pay through the nose. Students also feel a burden that they should be doing much better, but no matter how well you do, someone always does better.
Those who inherit wealth sometimes feel, why do I deserve to have this money? We are not talking here about ill-gotten gain. Some feel guilty because they are more attractive than their sibling. This is very real guilt, though there is no moral transgression.
But the guilt that Kafka, Camus and Sartre describe is not the guilt of privilege.
*Photo courtesy two stout monks.
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