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DISGUISES OF THE FEAR OF PUNISHMENT
and had it bandaged. On her next visit to Freud she described
her accident, but her explanation of it did not satisfy the
psychologist because he noticed that she showed marked signs of
pleasure and contentment about it. Subsequent analysis
revealed that she had invited the accident by neglecting to look
where she was going, because, as she explained, she felt guilty
of the death of her unborn child and had decided to punish
herself for it by causing the injuries she sustained.
It may be that some cases of suicide are to be explained in
this way. Dogged by a sense of guilt he cannot shake off, an
individual passes judgment on himself and becomes his own
executioner.
Fear of Punishment Disguised as Religious Guilt
The transition from fear of punishment to a conviction of
guilt is so easily made—‘I must be guilty or they wouldn’t
want to punish me’—that it is not surprising when the first
resolves into the second and, in a religious environment, is
converted into a conviction of sin. This often happens, not
because the victim of repression is himself deeply religious, but
because he moves in circles where a show of piety is observed
or conventionally religious ideas are accepted.
Sincerely religious people are sometimes victims of this
confusion, too. A young man confessed that he had become a
Christian because he was afraid of hell. The thought of eternal
punishment lies concealed behind much religious behaviour.
It has, of course, no place in a truly Christian ethic. There is no
critical difference between the person who goes in fear of earthly
justice and the one who dreads the justice of heaven. Both
betray a very shallow ethical attitude. Fearo f the consequences of
sin is a religiously toned fear of punishment, not a religious
sense of guilt.
One of the very common disguises of the fear of punishment is
an attitude of fatalism, or expectation of disaster. The sufferer
feels mingled anguish and anxiety because he is always troubled
with forebodings of evil. Rational and irrational factors are
sometimes intermingled in this frame of mind. A person knows
he has been guilty of a misdeed and goes in continual fear that he
will repeat it because he is ‘fated’ to do so. The expectation that
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