GUILT FEELING
Guilt is an important factor in
perpetuating obsessive - compulsive disorder symptoms. Guilt
and its associated causes, merits, and demerits 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 'conscience'.Sigmund Freud described this as the result of a
struggle between the ego and the superego – parental imprinting. Freud
rejected the role of God as punisher in times of illness or
rewarder in time of wellness. While removing one source of guilt from patients,
he described another. This was the unconscious force within the individual that
contributed to illness, Freud in fact coming to consider "the obstacle of
an unconscious sense of guilt...as the most powerful of all obstacles to
recovery.For his later explicator , 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." If
you feel guilty, you must be guilty!
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 , or the Dutch Guilt Measurement Instrument.
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