*”It has always seemed to me that guilt is not a true feeling, but rather a defense against sensations—of loneliness, ugliness, badness, and perhaps of remorse.
Guilt is a defense against true suffering.
This may sound heretical to you, but there is something highly manipulative and slippery about guilt. When people go on explaining how guilty they feel about something, it often strikes me as somehow unreal. It requires an audience.
Remorse is much deeper and more painful, and no amount of listeners can redeem it, because it is a confrontation with one’s own soul…
Remorse may be linked to some deeply inherent morality that is part of the inner essence, whereas guilt is linked to violations of collective ethics.
Remorse is often the beginning of a movement toward reality, toward accepting one’s own duality—in other words, Klein’s depressive position…
Guilt, to put it bluntly, is a kind of psychic antidepressant… And yes, I believe that depression—the kind that is nigredo, a process of separation and ‘selfishness’—is also an archetypal process of initiation in which the true individual conscience is forged.”*
— Liz Greene, “The Dynamics of the Unconscious”
If you have decided that the most important thing in your life is to see it as it truly is, rather than through the prism of your expectations and desires, here is a good place to start—begin making a distinction between guilt and remorse. Most of our problems stem from the fact that we distort reality to fit our beliefs, desires, and expectations—not so much the external reality, but our internal one.
We continue this until life begins to scream that something is wrong. What is wrong is the distortion of reality. Feeling guilty is also a form of such distortion.
I know of no better way to stop blaming people in the external world than to stop blaming ourselves for not being perfect. Therefore, as Liz Greene writes, becoming depressive in Melanie Klein’s sense is an expression of mental health. It means we are finally in contact with reality without distorting it.
Only then can we begin to change that reality. Before that, however, comes accepting it exactly as it is.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
