Guilt

Guilt is one of those amorphous words that twist and turn in the mind as they try to find a defining shape and all too often misidentify themselves as something they are not, in this instance, all too often, shame. As Irene Cairo explained in her introduction to this panel, it is the function of guilt that differentiates it from shame, and there is an important distinction to be made as well between “bad” guilt and “good.” Indeed, that distinction (the complexity of which she illustrated with two hypothetical “clinical cases,” Lady Macbeth for the bad and the Roman emperor Hadrian for the good) was the philosophical frame of the panel. Seeking to redress what Cairo deemed a wrong inflicted of late on the affect of guilt, the panel sought to identify the reasons for a decreased interest in guilt, as well as to uncover its multiple sources and the various ways it is dealt with in analytic treatment. Cairo wondered, for example, if the diminished interest in guilt in deference to shame might have to do, culturally speaking, with “an avoidance of addressing experiences that point toward assuming responsibility for ourselves, not just our actions but our minds.”

The panelists, Arnold Rothstein, Estelle Shane, and Virginia Ungar, represented diverse theoretical perspectives, the Freudian, the self psychological, and the Kleinian respectively. This lent an important measure of diversity to the presentations and the discussion. The format of the panel was as follows: In advance of the meeting, Cairo had posed the panelists a series of three questions (or sets of questions) to which they were to prepare responses. The first was diagnostic: “How do you detect unconscious guilt—in symptoms, in dreams, in defenses, as a compulsion to repeat?” The second was more developmental: “Do you think guilt and shame are comparable as moral regulators? Do you see the comparison as useful in childhood development? In adult functioning?” The third, in a sense more complex than the others in