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QUESTIONS OF GUILT
legal sense: they did kill people, often civilians. But they are certainly
less culpable than their leaders, the generals and the presidents who
create what I call the atrocity-producing situation in which it is the
norm to kill. In Vietnam, the veterans were being "normal," and the
man at Mylai who did not fire was "abnormal," maladapted (actually
he was maladapted to his combat unit for various reasons ). So al–
though they are culpable because people are after all culpable for
what they do, the psychological pressure on them, toward slaughter
and therefore toward a situation of profound guilt, was overwhelming.
These men had to balance themselves between the atrocity-producing
situation and their own struggle for a sense of responsibility.
When we move to the air war - which throws an interesting side–
light on the effects of technology on guilt and culpability - we move
still further and further away from the possibility of being able to feel
guilt. Fred Branfman in his studies on the air war shows that the
relationship to some need to explain the war has to do with how
high you fly. When you fly a B-52 you don't see the ground and you
don't have to at all explain what you're doing - your focus is on per–
formance. When you fly a fighter-bomber, you see something of what
goes on and you have to have some justification for what you're doing.
When you fly a helicopter, you see everything that goes on a nd you
have emotions similar to, and some in addition to, those of ground
troops, loaded with guilt and potential rage.
Very schematically, what I'm saying is that although as a psy–
chiatrist I was brought up to look upon guilt as a profound problem
within neurosis, as indeed it can be, one comes in certain situations
to value it as a process. We're now, I think, in danger of losing not so
much the capacity for guilt, but the capacity to be in touch with our
guilt, or to have an animating relationship to guilt. In Freudian theory
the idea of guilt is built around parricide and the Oedipus complex:
guilt is seen most fundamentally as an expression of something like
parricide. What I'm suggesting is a theory of guilt in which guilt comes
into the world, so to speak, not around the Oedipus complex, bio–
logically or genetically transmitted and re-stimulated within earh gen–
eration of family life, but rather, simply, around the issue of life and
death itself insofar as we take responsibility for death and dying or for
symbolic modes of killing or destroying aspects of others, whether lit–
erally their bodies or something more metaphorical in them or in our–
selves. Separation, disintegration, stasis, are all symbolized forms of
death imagery. So long as this goes on, we take on some responsibility
for the fact of death, and guilt is among us.
This is a very capsulized idea of guilt, but from this standpoint,
we rome to an idea something like this: just as anxiety is a warning
or threat, as Freud rightly said, a signal of danger to the organism
which therefore has survival value to the organism because it warns
us of a threat, eyen if that threat is distant and the anxiety itself can
become debilitating where it's symbolized. so does guilt ha\'e \'a lue for
the ethical orga nism. I think guilt has enormous surviyal \'alue because
it's bound up with identification \\'ith other groups, with the pain one
may cause or the person one is causing pain, and with, simply, the
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