Why do you want to make the feeling of guilt go away? Perhaps because then, as Paul Ricoeur estimated, we will be able to access a truth of ourselves? “The truth can only be a broken truth that emerges from the ordeal, having succeeded in pushing back the deadly guilt”, thus affirmed the philosopher. The feeling of guilt is one of the most universal and most archaic affections: it is the feeling of having committed a fault, whether it be real or imaginary. While it is normal to feel guilt from time to time, it can also be castrating. It is possible to get rid of it! For Ricoeur, grace is a way out of the obsession with guilt …

Jacques Lacan affirmed it: guilt belongs to the most universal and the most archaic affects, those which appear innately, just like anger or joy. And it is good, in fact, to know how to decode what this feeling of guilt signals to us, because “It very often reveals to us a value or an inspiration that we do not nourish”, specifies coach Nathalie Valentin. On the other hand, it also appears essential to be careful not to let yourself be blamed or manipulated by those around you.

It is indeed when we are not aligned with our values ​​or aspirations that the guilt mechanism begins. It even intervenes, sometimes, only on the basis of our thought, even before having acted. So, we separate ourselves from ourselves and we begin to judge ourselves, even mistreat ourselves, sometimes by somatizing, or by not taking advantage of the present moment. It even happens that this guilt causes us to miss opportunities.

But this guilt can also be useful to us: as coach Nathalie Valentin writes, »When an uncomfortable situation reoccurs, we remember the inconvenience it caused us previously and we are more able to act according to our values ​​or aspirations to make things better for us. . “

In fact, for the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, the feeling of guilt turns out to be ambivalent: it can be morbid, arising from repression. But it can also be healthy, valid and moral: it is then the expression of that I which is, in us, a real power of examination and judgment.

On the other hand, another psychoanalyst, Alfred Adler, suggests that guilt is linked to the feeling of inferiority that resides in us, as well as to the desire for compensatory omnipotence. Finally, to refer again to Lacan, the deepest source of guilt arises from the fact of “Give in to your desire”. 

Listening to your guilt, and then accepting that we are doing our best, are the first two steps in moving past your guilt. Third key: do not let yourself be blamed by others, and therefore manage to negotiate, to combine the satisfaction of your own needs with those of those around you.

For Lacan, the only thing of which we can be guilty is, in fact, not to assume our desires, to be “morally cowardly”. He doesn’t speak here “Of whims or sexual impulses to be satisfied immediately, even less of criminal or perverse tendencies, but of the vital force which leads our existence”. Jung, another great psychoanalyst, also judged guilt above all as that of oneself vis-à-vis oneself: by accepting oneself, one can then eject this guilt.

The whole theme of fault, defilement, sin, the experience of evil, which the Second World War had revived, haunts the work of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur: he will even make it his privileged object of philosophical questioning. .

The philosopher Nietzche is the one who most strongly denounced the feeling of guilt: he thus criticized Christianity which, for him, “Had caused the misfortune of man by making him feel guilty”. He was not totally wrong: thus Jean Delumeau, in his work Le Péché et la Fear, demonstrated how over the centuries “The Church has spread a guilty message, insisting on an inquisitive, accountant and avenging God”.

In fact, François Dosse, biographer of Paul Ricoeur, affirms it: “Both historically and individually, the return to the precise origin of the feeling of guilt seems blocked. But we can say that it is rooted in a tear in the relational fabric ”. This is also suggested by the philosopher Martin Buber, who believed that guilt constitutes an injury to the Toi-Moi relationship, de facto representing guilt towards others. It is therefore by caring for the link to the other that we will also be able to overcome it.

The message that psychoanalysis can send us, as Paul Ricoeur asserts, is “Its ability to reestablish communication”. And finally, for this philosopher, “Grace represents a way out of the obsession with guilt”.

In suffering, the Russian writer Dostoyevsky explored “The basements of consciousness and the prisons of the soul”, as the journalist Michel Eltchaninoff writes. And it appears, even today, although we have sent around since the 60s the old figures of authority (whether they are gods, fathers or traditions), that “The guilt chased out the door has reintroduced itself through the window”. And it is us, as well, “Difficult to get rid of the feeling of having loved badly, behaved badly, done badly”.

In his novel The Teenager, Dostoevsky outlines the intimate motor principle which can rehabilitate this guilt, under the astonishing term of “Living life”. And indeed, the notion of a life “Not boring and cheerful”, which is none other than the feeling of the intensity of life, makes the joy of being alive the foundation of happy guilt.

Still according to Dostoevsky, it is the guilt towards “Little others” which is to replace the alienating guilt in the face of the great Other, represented by the vengeful God or the Grand Inquisitor. Michel Eltchaninoff then suggests: “Loving life in its details, at all times, such is ultimately the key, as simple to think as it is difficult to achieve, of Dostoyevsky’s thought”.