520
QUESTIONS OF GUILT
his life, when he was putting together his philosophical anthropology,
he decided to deal with the subject of guilt. His criticism of psycho–
analysis was that, by and large, it studied guilt feelings, usually neuro–
tic guilt feelings, and did not pay enough attention to the ontic nature
of guilt. What he was trying to say, I think, if I can paraphrase him,
was that man is that creature who can be guilty and know that he is
guilty. Now this point of view is not very different from that of Hei–
degger, for example, who speaks of a primordial guilt. But my under–
standing of Buber's notion of guilt is that he was not confusing guilt
with original sin. He was not developing the subject in any psycho–
genetic way. He was simply saying that guilt is a part of the human
condition, and is unavoidable. In other words, there are so many op–
portunities in this life for injury and betrayal that every person, if he
acknowledges it, stands guilty.
Now in saying that psychoanalysis did not pay enough attention
to the ontic nature of guilt, Buber meant, I think, to refer to what we
call existential guilt, although I don't think the term "existential" is
necessary here. We could even use the term "real." But I will give
you a definition of existential guilt. Buber said that existential guilt
occurs when someone injures an order of the human world whose
foundations he knows and recognizes as those of his own existence and
all common human existence. In psychoanalysis, guilt had to be de–
rived from a transgression against ancient and modern taboos, against
parental and social tribunals. The feeling of guilt was understood as
essentially only the consequence of dread of punishment and censure
by this tribunal, as the consequence of the child's fear of loss of love
or, at times when it was a question of imaginary guilt, as a need for
punishment of a libidinal nature, as moral masochism which is com–
plemented by the sadism of the superego. Freud said in 1924, "The
first renunciation of instinctual gratification is enforced by external
powers, and it is this that creates morality, which expresses itself in con–
science and exacts a further renunciation of instinct."
In his essay "Guilt and Guilt Feelings," Buber makes a distinc–
tion between existential guilt and guilt feelings. Guilt feelings can
be
related to existential guilt - if I injure another human being, I can
feel guilty. Guilt feelings can be either authentic or inauthentic: they
can be neurotic; they can seemingly be groundless; and they can cer–
tainly be problematic. So the distinction is really between real guilt, in
terms of an injury that one acknowledges, and guilt feelings, which
may be authentic or inauthentic. Needless to say, in most guilty situa–
tions there's a mixture of all three. Now psychoanalytic literature, I
think Buber is correct, has very little to say about the subject of
real guilt.
It
has a great deal to say about the subject of guilt feelings.
and particularly neurotic guilt feelings. In looking through some of the
literature, I turned to Sullivan, for example, who says that guilt is
merely a form of anxiety. Karen Horney, one of the neo-Freudians,
has a long essay on neurotic guilt feelings in which she does a splendid
job in describing the defensive nature of neurotic guilt feelings and
how, very often, no guilt is actually involved - there are instead vari–
ous kinds of conceits and feelings of inferiority, and of course, as she
