Guilt, and its Evasions
Reflections on guilt, shame, and self-punishment
Chris Nash’s recent film In A Violent Nature is about a creature named Johnny which arises from the dead when some unsuspecting young adults find a shining golden necklace in the woods. Johnny emerges from the ground in the first scene of the movie to search for the necklace, which we learn later on is his mother’s which she gave to him.
Johnny (the undead slasher-villain in the film) is a tragic creature. In the 1930s or 40s, there were lumber camps in the woods, and they were all owned by one man, Johnny’s father. Johnny had some kind of developmental or intellectual disability (it is not specified what the nature of this was) and played in and around the lumber camps.
One day, Johnny was enticed to the top of a water tower by some lumberjacks under the pretense of giving him toys. When he got the top, they scared him — and he fell to his death.
Since then, Johnny has returned from the ground where he was buried to torment and murder, and maybe even ‘take revenge’ on the people nearby, including the rangers and visitors of the forest. Why, we might ask, is it so hard to put Johnny fully to rest? Why not, for instance, completely eviscerate his body or sink it to the bottom of the ocean? Or even put him in a prison?
Rather than seeking these final solutions, the solution is always the same: knock him out with non-lethal means, tie him up, and bury him again. And everyone knows that he’ll just be coming out again in the next few years to slaughter whatever is in sight.
It’s worth asking: why not just finish the job?
Lacan: Guilt as Giving Up One’s Desire
Guilt is often thought of as something that our conscience or superego inflicts upon us when we didn’t follow the rules. If we break the rules set by others (for instance, don’t be mean to others or don’t lie), we feel guilty. And if this happens enough, or if it happens a few times but very intensely, we might develop a neurosis, or at least some kind of compromise between the feeling of guilt and what we’ve done. We might even come right out and apologize for it — or we might seek out a psychotherapist or priest to absolve us of our sins.
But this is not the Lacanian way to think about guilt. For Lacan, guilt is always the opposite: it is born as a result of a subject not expressing or living out its desire. Therefore, we feel guilt not because we lied against the wishes of something greater than us (our moral imperatives or parents) but about our desire not being fully conveyed in the lie, or maybe the lie itself we felt as demanded by the big Other which we had to comply with.
Either way, guilt is always the result of giving up on one’s desire. Psychoanalytic treatment, therefore, is allowing the subject to articulate their desire more clearly and to figure out what it is exactly they want so they don’t have to feel so guilt about it. This jives with youth culture from the late 1960’s up until today, in which we are constantly told to live the life we want to live, do the things we want to do, and so on.
Carveth: Forms of Guilt
But does this version of guilt really encapsulate the dynamics of the ‘emotion’? Is there not a valid guilt, one that is warranted, and has nothing to do with desire?
Don Carveth develops a comprehensive theory of guilt in his 2013 Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt. In it, he distinguishes two forms of guilt which have been compressed in psychoanalysis into the first one only:
- Persecutory guilt (aka ‘shame’): the product of the paranoid-schizoid positionality in relation to destructive or aggressive impulses;
- Reparative guilt (aka ‘conscience’): the depressive position’s relation towards those impulses and how they concern the Other.
Carveth charges Freud with subsuming both versions within the structure of the superego, putting us in a rather awkward position regarding a handful of major psychic dynamics: guilt vs shame; passive vs active guilt; desire vs morality; and so on. In his view, psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have not been equipped to deal with the complexities of guilt due to their assumption, like Lacan’s, that there is only one register of guilt: that in relation to the inhibition of desire. With a few exceptions, like Klein and Winnicott, Carveth claims that this view of guilt renders psychoanalysis unaware of how to deal with guilt in the clinic.
We could think of the persecutory guilt in relation to Johnny. He is revived from the dead every time something disturbs him (like someone taking his mother’s necklace) and put back to this purgatory-like death after he’s killed a few people, mutilated their bodies, and so on. But no one seems interested in an effective solution, one that actively removes Johnny from the scene. Similarly, persecutory guilt is concerned with the self, it is basically narcissistic in that it is more concerned with self-punishment than with repairing damage caused to the Other.
Instead, hatred and aggression is directed onto the self/selves of the people in the film, who depict the ego, subject, or self in psychoanalytic terms. Instead of using their guilt to productively “make good” on the initial sin of killing Johnny (e.g., by completely eradicating his tortured existence), the characters of the film are more content with making the same adjustment repeatedly, leaving themselves open to the pain of (self-)flagellation that is so characteristic of persecutory guilt.
On the other hand, Carveth develops his theory of conscience, which is structurally different from the superego. If his position makes sense, then we (along with the history of psychoanalysis) can dispense with the tension of dissolving the superego but also losing morality. In Carveth’s clinic, we supplant the superego with conscience. I.e., we lose persecutory guilt and gain depressive guilt.
Obviously, he is drawing upon two major revisions to Freudian guilt: Klein and Winnicott.
For Klein, forms of guilt and anxiety (perhaps her two most important affects) looked different depending on the psychic position of the subject. In the Paranoid-Schizoid (P-S) position, guilt is persecutory: it is narcissistic and involves a fear of one’s own self dissolving. In the Depressive Position (D-P), one is concerned with damage and pain caused to the Other, primordially represented by the mother/caretaker. Winnicott adds to this the stages of pre-concern (or ruthlessness) and concern which correspond to Klein’s positions.
When we are operating in a depressive position, we are concerned for the Other and the harm we have caused it. We seek to make reparations, to apologize, to ‘atone’ for our ‘sins’ in Christian terms. It is unavoidable that we hurt other people. Winnicott called this basic motility: as the growing child learns its body, it will bite, scratch, and throw things. Outside of the immediate bodily movements, there are also the immense amount of sacrifices we demand of our parents and caregivers. And even beyond that, there is the Oedipal guilt all adult subjects wrestle with. There is harm and ‘sin’ everywhere in us.
Carveth views Freud’s reading of the Bible as missing the point. Freud seemed more concerned with the utopic end of salvation. Whereas, for Carveth, the real point of the Bible is the basic fallenness of humans. And we’re set to action to atone for this fallenness.
Ideally, that is. If we are in the D-P, we are concerned for the Other and this concern leads us to do something to make good on the pain we caused them. Conscience, the guiding principle here, is not in the business of self-criticism, as the superego is. Yes, it does hurt to have a conscience — but it also motivates and propels us forward into life and love and reparation. If the characters of In A Violent Nature loved more, they might put Johnny’s soul to rest at last.
But they are too narcissistic to see beyond their own self-hatred. This is seemingly ironic, because popular culture today may think that people who are narcissistic would keep Johnny alive so that they can continue the act of hurting him. But they don’t hurt him in the film, at least not in any immediate way. He is hurt by their continued negligence of their ethical responsibility to the Other. The first sin, the killing of Johnny, warrants guilt. What kind of guilt? That is up to the subject, and how they with to take responsibility for the guilt.
Evading Guilt
Carveth develops the idea that P-S guilt is an evasion of D-P guilt, in that an honest confrontation with one’s violence, one’s sexuality, one’s lack (to use a Lacanian term) is very painful. It brings one vis-a-vis with oneself and one’s actions. It also, and perhaps more painfully, brings one to bear their own fantasies.
Subjects feel guilt as a consequence with what they’ve done; they also, perhaps more prominently, feel guilt about what they think. Freud identified guilt as important to the structuring of the symptom of obsessional patients. An idea or wish, however subtle, (e.g., “I wish my father was out of the picture so I could have mother to myself”; fantasies about a loved one dying in a car accident) expresses a desire. And this is perhaps where Lacan comes back in.
The desire which goes unexpressed, like wanting out of a relationship, is transformed into a fantasy, like that person dying in a car accident. And when that transformation happens, we feel guilt. And instead of confronting this guilt, we develop symptoms, perhaps a depression wherein the aggression is turned toward the self; or a ritual to “undo” the thought-actions and fantasies, like checking the brakes on the car multiple times every morning before the partner goes to work. But these associations are unconscious at first. And until they are made conscious, they remain in the P-S position most likely. And those symptoms and that guilt can be paralyzing, and promote doing the same thing over and over again and getting hurt every time: like burying an undead creature in the woods hoping — but also very well knowing the outcome — that he will magically stop coming up to kill.
Rather than confront the conscience, we shore up the superego. But why? Isn’t the constant lacerations of the superego more painful than just ‘clearing the air’? Perhaps, certainly in the long run. And the ‘why’ is going to be peculiar to each subject who may find themselves in the consulting room of the psychotherapist or analyst. The initial work of this is to simply talk about fantasy or the act (e.g., the initial sin of killing Johnny) and all its details, as they do at the beginning of the film. Once the associations begin to connect and to form a picture, the subject gains some freedom back: they can choose if they want to do something with the guilt. They can choose, in other words, whether they want to live in the P-S or the D-P positions. They may not actually do anything — and perhaps nothing can be done to resolve the action or fantasy. But now they have the choice.
