Is there anything good about feeling guilty?
updated the 14 July 2015 à 18:34Not everything about feeling guilty is bad… Psychoanalyst Virginia Megglé invites us to go a little further and gives us the necessary tools to improve ourselves using our ‘guilt’.
Without this killjoy guilty feeling, we would be livened up only by the principle of pleasure. I will go for a walk if I want to, and I eat as much as chocolate as I want to, and I will buy three bags without asking myself if I have enough money to do it… Life without guilt? We don’t see how it would be possible, unless we were being extremely psychotic. It is a good thing there is a safeguard to centre us and tempt us to repair our behaviour when we have gone too far. “There is no good or bad guilt, but we can say that this feeling also encourages us to get empathy and to be vigilant”, says Virginia Megglé, psychoanalyst.
“The superego gags us, the guilt invites us to get back to awareness. A thought, a desire are not good or bad, but they are there to tell us something of our unconscious.” As long as we don’t act, we can always dream to throw our colleague through the window and to imagine the noise or her designer bag scratching against the floor, we only risk an unfounded accusation, that will not go far. Maybe that woman and her designer bag symbolize a luxury universe that annoys us (because in the family, we are not show-offs, because of our principle values). By the way, once we understand what takes place in our friendships and hostilities, in our thoughts as in our drives, we have no more reason to feel guilty or to blame the other. That is another way to fix our guilt problem.
Read more from our ‘Guilt‘ report:
We were born guilty, but guilty of what?
The female guilt: Is it always the mother’s fault?
Test your guilt
Testimonies: I depreciate myself all the time
Grégoire Provost
