You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This Paper has several aims: to offer an exposition of Jung's understanding of guilt, to situate this in the existential phenomenological tradition, and to relate it to findings of empirical research into the phenomenology of guilt. What follows emerges from my study of the experience and meaning of guilt as it is lived in everyday interpersonal and biographical contexts.
The details of the approach and its justification cannot be discussed here. Interested readers may refer to Colaizzi (7), Giorgi (20, 21), Kruger (48), Romanyshyn (58), and Strasser (61). Nevertheless, a few introductory remarks are in order. The traditional methodology of empirical research psychology—operationalisation of variable, hypothesis testing, and statistical analysis—fails to study the phenomenon as such. This means that the actual structure of the phenomenon in human life remains opaque, or disclosed only in ambiguous or even distorted ways. It is for this reason that psychotherapists (including analysts) tend to bypass academic psychology as being for the most part irrelevant, for it does not help their understanding of what is going on in the rough-and-tumble immediacy of psychotherapy. The approach in the present study sought to be both empirical and phenomenological, to be scientifically rigorous and directly relevant to depth psychotherapy and psychoanalytic theory, to help me as a researcher of human experience and as a psychotherapist.
Before proceeding, there are three points I would like to make. First, the study was able to bear on psychoanalytic theory because phenomenology and psychoanalytic inquiry move in the same direction, or ‘intend the same latency’, as Merleau-Ponty put it (quoted in ROMANYSHYN, 57, p. 211). It is a common misunderstanding of phenomenology to suppose that it is concerned only with consciousness in the narrow, reflective sense of the word.