Freud and Modern Psychology

Abstract

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Empathy, Shame, Guilt, and Narratives of Interpersonal Conflicts: Guilt‐Prone People Are Better at Perspective Taking

“…In guilt, the negative affect and remorse remain linked to the particular action; in simple terms, one can regard oneself as a good person who has done a bad thing. As a result, guilt stimulates people to counteract the bad consequences of their actions, for example, by confessing, by apologizing, or by making amends (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1995;Lewis, 1971Lewis, , 1981Lewis, , 1983Lewis, , 1987Holtzworth-Munroe, 1989;Katz, 1963;Lindsay-Hartz, 1984;McGraw, 1987;Tangney, 1989Tangney, , 1990Tangney, , 1991Tangney et al, 1992). All of these prosocial responses seemingly involve an appreciation of the other person's perspective, insofar as the guilty individual reflects on how his or her transgression has affected the other person and how particular reparative acts (such as an apology) will offset the harm and possibly restore the other's positive attitude toward oneself.…”

“…To obtain these criteria, we turned to the work of Helen Block Lewis (1971Lewis ( , 1981Lewis ( , 1983Lewis ( , 1987. Her work has been widely influential and is commonly regarded as the essential link between traditional theorizing about guilt and the modern, empirically based approaches.…”

“…Despite these similarities and overlaps, it is clear that people can reliably and consistently distinguish between shame and guilt, in the sense that people can describe episodes of the two emotions in ways that maintain consistent distinctions (Lewis, 1971(Lewis, , 1981(Lewis, , 1983(Lewis, , 1987Lindsay-Hartz, 1984;Tangney, 1989Tangney, , 1990Tangney, , 1992. One important difference is the globality of focus.…”

“…After all, it would be futile to focus on remedying one particular misdeed if the core problem is that the entire self is riddled with inadequacies; all that such remedial efforts might accomplish would be to dwell on this latest reminder of one's deficient personhood. The only responses that seem to minimize the subjective distress of shame are to ignore the problem, to deny one's responsibility, to avoid other people, or perhaps to lash out at one's accusers (Lewis, 1971(Lewis, , 1981(Lewis, , 1983(Lewis, , 1987Holtzworth-Munroe, 1989;Katz, 1963;Lindsay-Hartz, 1984;McGraw, 1987;Tangney, 1989Tangney, , 1990Tangney, , 1991Tangney et al, 1992). Such responses would obviously be unlikely to have the prosocial, relationship-enhancing effects that the responses to guilt seem to have.…”

Repression, accessibility, and the translation of private experience.

“…their subjective qualities (Johnson, 1988;Johnson & Suengas, in press). ma interpretations or "narratives" (Spence, 1982(Spence, , 1987 and gradually revising their content and structure (Schafer, 1983), as a process of testing and revising dysfunctional beliefs (Edelson, 1988;Weiss & Sampson, 1986); or, in a more global vein, applying information processing concepts such as schema (Horowitz, 1988;Singer, 1985;Singer, Sincoff, & Kolligian, 1989) and script (Bonanno, 1990;Lewis, 1983). Another school of analytic thought, the structural deficits school, has also emerged, which, although not explicitly acknowledging the reconstructive nature of memory, appears to have adapted to the problem of organization by proposing therapeutic interventions that aim beyond the notion of dynamic conflict and content and toward a greater concern with structural deficits within the self and the development of new psychic structures (Gedo, 1979(Gedo, , 1984(Gedo, , 1988Kohut, 1971Kohut, , 1977Kohut, , 1984.…”