The feeling of guilt in the present time

When we carry out a psychological treatment it is very common to find in the people we treat a strong feeling of guilt. It is usually the people who come to therapy who wonder about what they are not doing well, wonder if what is wrong in their relationships is themselves or feel guilty for not being able to cope with the pressures of life. Often it is this feeling that leads them to seek a psychologist.

Psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino states: “The origin of guilt is social, although the experience of guilt is personal. The induction of presumed guilt is verified by society as a form of group praxis” [i] As it is social, it depends on the culture in which we live how it is implemented and how it is experienced by the person. According to this psychiatrist, the experience of guilt is personal, but there are cultures where guilt is inherited, transferable to another family member, is group-based or cannot be experienced. But in the Western society in which we live, guilt is individual and non-transferable. It is not unusual to find a large number of people who come to us tormented by an “overthinking”, anguished or strongly saddened and with a strong feeling of guilt.

The feeling of guilt in our current culture

If guilt is cultural, what is the place of guilt in today’s culture? In today’s age, people are subjected to a strong pressure disguised as freedom. We are told that we can achieve anything we set our minds to, that everything depends on our effort and our abilities. We are subjected to competition, to the market, to produce more, to have more and more money or success. I am going to take the argument of the philosopher Byung Chul Han in his book “Psychopolitics” to delve into the feeling of guilt today. According to this author, “We are living in a special historical phase in which freedom itself gives rise to coercion. The freedom of the power to do generates even more coercion than the disciplinary duty. Duty has a limit. The power to do, on the contrary, has none. That is why the coercion that comes from the power to do is unlimited. We find ourselves, therefore, in a paradoxical situation. Freedom is the counter-figure of coercion. Freedom, which should be the opposite of coercion, generates coercion. Illnesses such as depression and burnout syndrome are the expression of a profound crisis of freedom. They are a pathological sign that today freedom becomes, by various means, coercion.”[ii]

In what way does freedom become coercion according to this author? In performance for example, it is no longer necessary to have a master who enslaves us to work us to the point of exhaustion, we submit ourselves to work tirelessly.We are entrepreneurs of ourselves, the self is constituted as a project: to be the best version of ourselves, to polish our skills, to optimize ourselves, to know how to sell ourselves, etc.The author continues:“Today everyone is a worker who exploits himself in his own company (the self as an entrepreneurial project). . Everyone is master and slave in one person.Also the class struggle is transformed into an internal struggle with oneself.”[iii].

feeling, freedom, guilt, individualism

In the past, religion was one of the sources of guilt in people. Under the law of God one had to obey its postulates, commandments and impositions.But even that guilt was limited to a certain action or command, one could ask for forgiveness and expiation of guilt through certain rituals.This philosopher writes: “Walter Benjamin conceives of capitalism as a religion.It is the “first case of a cult that is not expiatory but guilt-ridden”.Because it is not possible to liquidate debts, the state of lack of freedom is perpetuated: “A terrible conscience of guilt that does not know how to expiate itself, resorts to the cult not to expiate guilt but to make it universal.” [iv] As the French psychoanalyst Lacan said,“One of the strangest things that there can be, and analysis has had to announce it to us, is that there is no need for any reference, neither to God nor to his law, for man to swim literally in guilt.Experience teaches us this. It even seems that the opposite expression can be formulated, namely, that if God is dead, nothing is allowed any more.”[v]

People in the current neoliberal system have only to take responsibility for their own situation, they do not question the system, they cannot unite with others in the struggle against what is not going well in the system, but each one is left with his own internal battle, ashamed. The person as an entrepreneur of himself creates ties with others based on his interests, the exacerbated individualism leaves him alone and with a strong feeling of guilt for never being able to complete this project of himself which is always endless

How to deal with the guilt generated by the current neoliberal system? There is a process of deconstruction in psychotherapy of everything that oppresses us today, those mandates we have internalized and often do not know how they are operating in oneself. To be able to know how these mandates operate in the logic of each one helps to distance oneself from them, the unattainable production, self-enslavement or self-exploitation, to find a less demanding place, to limit that demand of excessive productivity or permanent optimization. To find the true meaning of the word freedom, which according to this philosopher, “to be free means to be among friends. “Freedom” and ‘friend’ have the same root in Indo-European. Freedom is, fundamentally, a relational word. One feels free only in a successful relationship, in a satisfactory coexistence. The total isolation to which the liberal regime leads us does not really make us free.”[vi]