THREE WINES: RATIONAL, IRRATIONAL, EXISTENTIAL

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Three feelings of guilt haunt a person throughout his life: a sense of real guilt, an irrational sense of guilt and a sense of existential guilt.

Rational guilt is of great value. It reflects reality, informing a person that he has sinned in front of others. Rational guilt signals a person that he needs to correct his behavior.

A person who is capable of feeling rational guilt can use this feeling as a guide to moral behavior. The ability for rational guilt makes it possible to regularly examine your values and try to live, as much as possible, in accordance with them.

Rational guilt helps you correct your mistakes, act morally, and take initiative. Rational guilt is a good helper in treating each other with compassion and magnanimity.

Rational guilt is definitely a human condition. Everyone commits aggressive actions or has morally unacceptable aggressive thoughts. When this happens, people feel real guilt; they feel uncomfortable because they have violated their own ethical standards. Rational guilt encourages them both to correct their mistakes and to be generous towards others.

Rational guilt is a realistic response to harm actually done to others, it is always proportional to the actual amount of harm and decreases when the person stops guilty behavior and corrects mistakes.

People experiencing rational guilt may feel the need to repent, ask for forgiveness, atone for guilt, and be punished accordingly. The purpose of these needs is to regain identity, to live in peace with oneself and society. Such people are aware of not only their real guilt, but also the strengths of their personality, such as strength, honesty, or loyalty. They recognize that they are human beings who try to be honest with themselves and others, but can be wrong.

Feelings of irrational guilt develop during childhood. Children are often led to believe they are causing problems they have no control over, including divorce, family member scandals, or addictions. Children may try to correct these perceived mistakes, be zealous in self-punishment, or decide never to harm anyone again. They begin to shy away from natural self-assertion, evaluating it as dangerous aggression. They may also fear that others will be angry with them for their behavior and attempts to assert themselves. Children often carry such irrational guilt into adulthood.

A person who is prone to developing irrational guilt does not feel completely human. His identity is unacceptable - he feels inherently guilty. The experience of irrational guilt can be the result of threats of deprivation of parental love if the child is explained a causal relationship between his offense and this threat. In this case, the threat of deprivation of love becomes a signal for the child that he has committed a wrong act in relation to a loved one. The child realizes that his real or imagined wrong actions have become an obstacle between him and his beloved parent, that he has become a reason for parental alienation, that his behavior interferes with normal interaction with a loved one.

In some cases, the parent induces a feeling of guilt in the child for the very fact of his existence ("If you weren't there, I could be successful", "If you weren't born so early, I could learn", "If it weren't for you, I wouldn’t live with your father”). Thus, from the early years of his life, an irrational sense of guilt is formed in a person, in relation to the very fact of his existence, which in some of the most extreme cases can lead to the deprivation of his life. Such messages from family members are often passed on from generation to generation, which becomes socially dangerous, since such people themselves become inductors who infect other people with failures, disbelief, disappointment and conflicts.

Irrational guilt has as much to do with guilt as arrogance has to shame. In each of these situations, the person is more likely to try to work around the problem than outgrow it.

There is also a type of irrational moralist who tries to maintain their moral identity as selfless people, devoid of all selfishness. They can become “righteous,” convinced that they have mastered the art of caring for others. They "confess" their virtues (which cannot do without irrational guilt) instead of confessing their sins.

The irrational feeling of guilt is sometimes also called protective - it helps to maintain the ideal image of the Self, protects from internal stress. In some cases, a person exaggerates his real guilt. One of the psychological explanations for this is as follows. If I am the cause of some event (even a bad one), then I am not an “empty space”, something depends on me. That is, with the help of an irrational sense of guilt, a person tries to confirm his significance. It is much more painful for him to admit the fact that he could not influence anything, to admit his powerlessness to change anything, than to say “this is all because of me!”.

K. Horney, investigating the feeling of guilt, drew attention to the fact that if you carefully examine the feeling of guilt and test it for authenticity, it becomes obvious that much of what seems to be a feeling of guilt is an expression of either anxiety or protection from it.

Due to the highest anxiety in neuroses, a neurotic is more likely than a healthy person to cover up his anxiety with a sense of guilt. Unlike a healthy person, he not only fears the consequences that may well take place, but foresees in advance the consequences that are absolutely disproportionate to reality. The nature of these premonitions depends on the situation. He may have an exaggerated idea of the impending punishment, retribution, abandonment by all, or his fears may be completely vague. But whatever their nature, all his fears arise at the same point, which can be roughly defined as fear of disapproval or, if the fear of disapproval is tantamount to the consciousness of sinfulness, as fear of exposure.

I. Yalom notes the phenomenon of neurotic guilt, which "comes from imaginary crimes (or minor offenses causing a disproportionately strong reaction) against another person, ancient and modern taboos, parental and social prohibitions." "Coping with neurotic guilt is possible by working through one's own" badness ", unconscious aggressiveness and desire for punishment."

There are chronically irrationally guilty people, most often this feeling is a heavy legacy of the ego of a difficult childhood, however, people who are not inclined to develop such a feeling can experience irrational guilt from time to time. For example, if a skillful narcissistic manipulator or psychopath meets on their way, or if a certain situation that provoked this feeling, in its psychological content, resembles past, previously unconscious misdeeds.

Yalom assigns the role of an adviser to existential guilt. How to reveal your potential? How can you recognize it when you meet its manifestation? How do we know that we have lost our way? Yalom asks questions. He finds answers to these questions in the works of M. Heidegger, P. Tillich, A. Maslow and R. May."With the help of Guilt! With the help of Anxiety! Through the call of the unconscious!"

The above thinkers agree that existential guilt is a positive constructive force, a counselor that brings us back to ourselves.

Existential guilt is universal and is not the result of failure to comply with parental orders, "but stems from the fact that a person can view himself as an individual who is able or unable to make a choice" (R. May).

Thus, the concept of "existential guilt" is closely related to the concept of personal responsibility. Existential guilt comes to a person when he realizes that he actually has obligations to his own being, when he realizes how important it is to realize the potential determined by nature. Existential guilt is not related to cultural prohibitions or the introjection of cultural prescriptions; its roots lie in the fact of self-awareness. Every person experiences an existential sense of guilt, despite the fact that its essence will undergo changes in different societies, and to a greater extent will be determined by the society itself.

Existential guilt is not neurotic guilt per se, although it does have the potential to transform into neurotic guilt. If this guilt is not recognized and repressed, then it can develop into a neurotic feeling of guilt. And since neurotic anxiety is the end result of natural existential anxiety, which was tried to be ignored, it follows that neurotic guilt is the result of a lack of opposition to existential guilt. If a person can realize and accept this, then such guilt is not pathological.

However, with the right approach, existential guilt can benefit a person. Conscious existential guilt contributes to the development of the ability to put up with the world around us, empathize with other people, and develop one's potential.

R. May considered another kind of existential guilt - guilt for the impossibility of complete merging with another person. A person cannot look at the world through the eyes of another person, he cannot feel the same as the other person, he cannot merge with him. This kind of failure underlies existential isolation or loneliness. This isolation creates an insurmountable barrier that separates a person from other people, becomes the cause of interpersonal conflicts.

A person must listen to his existential guilt, which prompts him to make a fundamental decision - to radically change his lifestyle, change himself, become himself.

I. Yalom points out that the awareness of existential guilt in a number of cases can hinder the further development of a person. Since the decision to change implies that the person alone is responsible for the past collapse of his life and could have changed a long time ago. And the experience of existential guilt "makes the individual reflect on the waste - how it happened that he sacrificed so much of his unique life." To take a step towards change is to acknowledge the shamefulness of your past. And a person, in order to get rid of the recognition of his past life as one big mistake, supplants the feeling of existential guilt, while remaining faithful to the usual stereotypes.