Viktor Frankl: “Guilt can only be personal”

For Viktor Frankl, the question of a person’s guilt for committing evil, and in particular, for crimes during World War II, was not speculative. The famous psychiatrist remained in Vienna after the outbreak of the war and in 1942, together with his relatives, was sent to a concentration camp. His parents and wife died there.

Frankl survived and in the first years after his release published several books in which he developed the doctrine of the pursuit of meaning as the main driving force of human life. He also thought a lot about individual and collective responsibility for crimes. We have collected several quotes from a psychologist about this.

***

“Guilt can only be personal – guilt in what I did myself or what I did not do! But I cannot be guilty of what other people did, even if they were my fathers or grandfathers. To suggest to the Austrians, who are now between 20 and 50 years old, some, so to speak, “collective guilt” … I consider it criminal and insane.”

***

“If there is something like collective responsibility, it can only be on a planetary scale. Let one hand not imagine a lot about itself because it was not her, but the other hand was struck by a tumor; After all, only the whole organism is always sick. And in the same way, let other nations not rejoice that not they, but the German nation, fell under the influence of National Socialism, because then all of humanity was sick.

***

“The possession of responsibility is the dignity of man, the dignity of each individual. And it always depends on the individual person whether he tramples on this dignity with his feet or retains it in himself. Just as the latter constitutes a person’s personal merit, so the former constitutes his personal guilt.

***

“Of course, there are aggressive impulses in man, whether we interpret them as a heritage inherited from pre-human ancestors, or as something reactive in the spirit of psychodynamic theories. However, aggressive impulses never exist per se, but always as something in relation to which a person must take a certain position, in relation to which he constantly takes a certain position, whether he chooses to identify himself with them or separate himself from them.

In this case, the personal attitude to impersonal aggressive impulses is significant, and not these impulses themselves … Fatalism, resulting from preferential attention to aggressive impulses … turns them into an alibi, into a justification for hatred. Man will not stop hating as long as he is taught that hatred is created by impulses and mechanisms. But he hates it himself!

When guilt can be collective

Over time, Frankl acknowledged that there are still situations where guilt or responsibility can be collective:

“Guilt for joining a certain group. Here there is a personal decision, as a result of which a person becomes to a certain extent also personally accomplice, for example, if a certain party has committed crimes envisaged by its program. However, when joining a party, in each individual case, it is necessary to check how much a person was subjected to pressure, whether he acted under duress, against his will.

Deciding who, when and what responsibility bears is, of course, “a delicate issue”. In any case, the right to condemn another belongs only to those who can prove to themselves that they themselves would have acted differently. Only the one who himself preferred to end up in a concentration camp rather than succumb to someone else’s pressure – only he, in fact, can break the sword over those who surrendered.