Remorse as a Derivative Psychoanalytic Construct

I understand the meaning of remorse. I have remorse—for losing Lisa—I have remorse for losing my life.

joe/ Steinberg

You have never shown any remorse and have not accepted any responsibility for what you did. You deserve the maximum sentence.

Acting Justice Harold I. Rothwax

(New York Times, March 25, , 738, 2)

Arbitrators of linguistic and colloquial usage of affect-laden terms have not fared better with remorse as a concept than has the legal world. In Wechsler's (1981) seminal work on intelligence, he delineates the sophisticated definition of remorse as “a feeling of distress or regret caused by a sense of guilt,” while a less acceptable definition is given as “a feeling of unhappiness which is not caused by a sense of guilt.” (p. 99). The finer shades of the concept and its variegated implications in the literature have had repercussions in the analytic sphere as well, as evidenced by the recent devotion of an entire issue of The Psychotherapy Patient, a journal for practitioners, to the remorseful patient.

The focus of this article is on remorse as a concept and a process, rather than on the remorseful patient. While some of the discussion inevitably has implications for the person who is remorseful, the patient, as such, is beyond its scope.

The most comprehensive differentiation of terms relevant to our current topic is to be found in Renshaw (1985), who offers the following clinical demarcations:

Guilt: a designated legal or ethical culpability. Blame: to accuse or condemn for being at fault.