Encore Archive

Welcome to Encore, the place where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on topics of the moment. Each week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

To access the CLAL Encore Archive, click here.

To join the conversation at CLAL Encore Talk, click here.

In Praise of Guilt

Marian Henriquez Neudel (Sh'ma, 13/256, September 2, 1983)

It is unfashionable these davs to have any kind words for guilt. "Guilt-tripping" is often considered more deplorable than the original misdeed that provoked it. Indeed, sometimes guilt-tripping seems to constitute retroactive justification for whatever the guilt-trippee was expected to feel guilty about. The etiquette of avoiding guilt-tripping has not yet been fully worked out; if you actively reproach someone who has mistreated you, of course, that's obvious and intentional guilt-tripping. But if you don't say anything at all about it, that's the ultimate in subtle, high-class guilt-tripping. The only acceptable alternative may be outright revenge, hardly likely to improve interpersonal relations over the long term.

Our disapproval of guilt-tripping has political aspects too. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, Zionism, the revival of public interest in the Holocaust, and numerous other recent evolutions in politics are all seen in some quarters as guilt-tripping. And the affluent, or white, or male, or non-Jewish intellectuals who comment on these movements find it easy to discount them for that reason, without bothering to examine the realities behind the movements.

Our rejection of guilt on the personal, and political levels arose from Freudian and post- Freudian psychology. The Freudians found many of their patients crippled by guilt from long- buried oedipal wishes and desires. A large part of psychoanalytic work was devoted to relieving that guilt. Later schools of psychotherapy dealt with interactions between family members and the way in which guilt could be inflicted, especially on children, by other family members for imagined or trivial offenses, and used as a means of manipulating the victim for years afterward. The task of the therapist was often to show both parties the underlying motives for this interaction and enable them to quit.

"I Hate Yom Kippur"

But we seem to have extended these basically laudable principles far beyond their origin. Now it is guilt-tripping to reproach anyone (or oneself) even for really unconstructive, antisocial, malicious or reckless conduct. "I hate Yom Kippur" one of my friends says. "I can't stand being expected to spend a whole day hitting myself over the head." And I think it is precisely at Yom Kippur that our misunderstanding of the value of guilt is most clearly revealed.

Because, of course, the point of Yom Kippur is not to spend a whole day hitting oneself over the head. The point is teshuvah, radical change in one's conduct. The Jewish tradition assumes that teshuvah is psychologically possible and socially necessary. If you make that assumption, then the effort to figure out where you went wrong in the first place is well worth it. Guilt, in the sense of awareness of one's faults and failures, is merely one very constructive kind of information-gathering on the basis of which one can do teshuvah. There isn't even anything wrong, with calling someone else's wrongdoing to their attention, provided one isn't too obnoxious about it. It's certainly no worse than telling whoever cooked dinner that there was too much salt in the soup -- as long as the point is to help prevent a recurrence.

The reason we have extended the concept of guilt-tripping to include any reproach, however mild, for any wrongdoing, however gross, is, I suspect, that at heart we no longer believe in teshuvah. We no longer believe that it is possible for human beings to change their conduct, still less that anybody else has the right to demand such a change. "I am not in the world to live up to your expectations," Fritz Perls tells us. (I know a woman who has that text on her wall under a picture of Adolf Hitler.) If teshuvah isn't possible, of course, then reproaching somebody (or oneself for wrongdoing really is gratuitously unpleasant, no better than hitting them (or oneself over the head. There is no way for guilt to serve a constructive purpose. Better to stop making demands and just let people (or oneself behave as their (one's) nature inexorably dictates. The situation can't be improved, but there's no point in making it any worse.

We do not Believe in Rehabilitation

This view is perfectly consistent with our recently-acquired cynicism about prison rehabilitation programs. Once we accept that premise, of course, nothing but mere sentimental liberalism blocks the way to capital punishment for any lower-class street crime, preferably on the first offense. Similarly, this view fits quite well with our increasing skepticism about the ability of schools to give an education to anybody who couldn't have picked one up on his own or from his family if necessary. It feeds easily into increasing public unwillingness to deal with the political and social consequences of slavery and segregation, racists can't be changed, so why should they be abused? The same goes for sexists and anti-Semites, of course. Anybody who wants to protect him/herself from the unpleasant consequences of other people's presumably unalterable prejudices can do so only by inheriting large sums of money or by buying a gun.

Probably the problem stems from the belief current among some Christians that it is not possible to change someone's conduct without first changing his/her personality. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." "Any man who looks on a woman with lust, it is as if he had committed adultery with her in his heart." And so on. Unfortunately, this approach seems counter-productive for many people, who get caught up in obsessive efforts to control their thoughts and attitudes, and often just end up tripping over their own neuroses.

Proper Conduct Shapes Personality

The Jewish tradition is not without these obsessive elements, especially in the area of sex, but it is generally more pragmatic, more concerned with conduct. The Jewish tradition is that proper conduct often shapes personality, rather than the other way around. But even if it doesn't, the world is still, objectively, a better place if fewer acts of thoughtlessness, recklessness, and outright malice and more acts of human decency are happening.

Quite possibly, then, the best way to tell the difference between real guilt-tripping and justified reproach and criticism is that the former is intended to make its target feel bad, and the latter is an attempt to make him/her behave better. Obviously, most of the time, the motives of most human beings are mixed. The most constructive critics among us are not above an occasional intentional infliction of a twinge of guilt. But that tendency too is not to be accepted as unalterable. Teshuvah is possible -- even for guilt-trippers.