PARTISAN REVIEW
5115
proof of these assumptions one way or the other. But though it's some–
what schematic, I would say that guilt that can be judged externally
and guilt that can be experienced subjectiyely is there. How much ,
and to what degree, is another matter.
I'd like now to go back to studies I've worked with, and talk for
a moment of the ways in which sma ller groups haye experienced guilt,
and in which guilt had been a fulcrum for certain kinds of experience.
For if one looks upon the problem psycho-historically, one finds cer–
tain shared themes along with certain historical experiences. That is,
a population that has had a common historical experience may have a
shared kind of response which can, of course, im'oh'e guilt. I want to
say something about Chinese thought reform, about Hiroshima sur–
vival, and particularly about anti-war veterans, which are the last group
I've been working with most recently and am still working with now.
In Chinese thought reform, the reformers attempted, through so–
called brainwashing, to produce guilt, to stimulate it, both in a group
of Westerners who'd been in prison and in a group of Chinese who'd
been in various reform centers. To put it yery briefly, with the West–
erners there was great success in obtaining confessions, often what we
call false confessions, because sufficient guilt could be evoked to make
the false confession feel real: the guilt perceived or the guilt experienced
was more real than the content, so to speak, " 'hich often ,,'as fallacious
or a fabrication, ( Parenthetically, the attempt at conversion to the
Communist world view was much less successful " 'ith ''''esterners, ) The
issue of guilt was central because, to the extent that the Westerners
could feel , for instance, that the Chinese were the only true Chris–
tians - and this was especially true of ''''estern priests, as many of the
prisoners were - a yery profound impact was made and none of them
left without an important residuum of guilt. With Chinese intellec–
tuals, on the other hand , the potential for guilt ,,'as much greater,
because they could be accused and cou ld feel yery pained about their
separa tion from the Chinese people, about their elite status, In what
I call the guilt of social dislocation, their \'erv lack of anything to be
loyal to was a profound source of ,l?;uilt, since ma ny of them- \\'ere in
conflict bet\\'een their filial affiliations and their later Communist af–
filiations. Understandably and predictably, the process of turnover or
transforma tion or reform \\'as much more successful with Chinese than
with Westerners. But around both, the fulcrum \\'as gu ilt. Both felt a
certain amount of culpability in a moral sense, if not a criminal sense,
although criminality was implied in the image of the imperialist, around
which Westerners felt very culpable - eyen if they didn ' t literally feel
themseh-es to be imperialists, they did feel part of that history,
In ,general , though, those experiences of ,gu ilt went beyond the
feeling of cu lpability, and had a lot to do with confession or change,
If.
on the other hand , one moves to the stud\' of Hiroshima survivors
which I undertook later on, one finds in the' experience of survivors
a more paradoxical kind of guilt. one in \\'hich , to put it yery simply,
the guilt of those \\'ho are victimized becomes g reater than that of the
victimizers, ''''e\'e all heard that bitter concentration camp survivor
