Existential Guilt

Video: Existential Guilt

Video: Existential Guilt
Video: Existential Guilt 2024, March
Existential Guilt
Existential Guilt
Anonim

“When the basic [inborn] personality essence is denied or suppressed, a person gets sick, sometimes explicitly, sometimes hidden … This inner essence is fragile and sensitive, it easily succumbs to stereotypes and cultural pressure … Even being denied, it continues to live in secret, constantly demanding actualization … Every apostasy from our own essence, every crime against our nature is fixed in our unconscious and makes us despise ourselves."

Abraham Maslow

People often prefer to be sure that “it's too late for me,” and a negative state or situation is irreparable, in order to avoid existential guilt.

My favorite Irwin Yalom wrote a lot about this in the book Existential Psychotherapy: “In therapy based on an existential point of view,“guilt”has a slightly different meaning than in traditional therapy, where it denotes an emotional state associated with the experience of wrong actions - an all-pervading, highly uncomfortable state, characterized by anxiety combined with a feeling of one's own "badness" (Freud notes that subjectively "the feeling of guilt and the feeling of inferiority are difficult to distinguish"). (…)

This position - "A person is expected to make of himself what he can become in order to fulfill his destiny" - originates from Kierkegaard, who described a form of despair associated with unwillingness to be himself. Self-reflection (awareness of guilt) temper despair: not knowing that you are in despair is an even deeper form of despair.

The same circumstance is pointed out by the Hasidic rabbi Sasha, who shortly before his death said: "When I come to heaven, they will not ask me there:" Why did you not become Moses? " Instead, they will ask me: “Why were you not Sasha? Why didn't you become what only you could become?"

Otto Rank was acutely aware of this situation and wrote that by protecting ourselves from living too intensively or too quickly, we feel guilty about the unused life, the unlived life in us.

(…) The fourth deadly sin, idleness or laziness, was interpreted by many thinkers as "the sin of not doing in his life what a person knows he can do." This is an extremely popular concept in modern psychology (…). It appeared under many names ("self-actualization", "self-realization", "self-development", "disclosure of potential", "growth", "autonomy", etc.), but the underlying idea is simple: every human being has innate abilities and potentials and, moreover, the initial knowledge of these potencies. Someone who fails to live as tightly as possible experiences a deep, intense experience that I call here "existential guilt."

There is another aspect of existential guilt. Existential guilt before oneself is the price a person pays for the non-embodiment of his fate, for alienating himself from his true feelings, desires and thoughts. To put it very simply, this concept can be formulated as follows: “If I admit that I can change this now, then I will have to admit that I could have changed it long ago. This means that I am guilty that these years have passed in vain, I am guilty of all my losses or non-gains. It is not surprising that the older a person is, the older his particular problem or general feeling of dissatisfaction with life, the stronger his existential guilt towards himself will be.

The same Yalom has a psychotherapeutic story of a woman who could not quit smoking and because of this her health deteriorated greatly, and her husband (an intolerant, cruel and centered on a healthy lifestyle) gave her an ultimatum “either me or smoking”, left her when she could not part with this habit. Her husband (in spite of all his features), this woman was very dear. And her health at some point deteriorated to such an extent that it was about amputation of her legs. In psychotherapy, she discovered that if she allowed herself to quit smoking now, then she would have to admit that if she had done it earlier, her marriage would be preserved, and her health would not deteriorate to such an extent. It was such a devastating experience that it was easier to remain convinced, "I can't change this."

To admit this (especially when it comes to something very significant and desired) can be so painful and unbearable that a person prefers to live with his suffering as with irreparable: “I could not do anything about it then, because with it is impossible to do anything in principle”.

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