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CHAPTER 111
THF REAL GUILT FEELING
GUILT is not another word for gloom or depression, though it
may sometimes be accompanied by these feelings or others of
independent mental origin.
A. J., an obviously robust and healthy farmer, has always
suffered from intermittent periods of unrest and depression.
Some time ago he began to attend church regularly. After a
recent service he became markedly introverted and distressed
in manner. His normal good temper and gaiety of spirits
completely disappeared. He would waken in the night suffering
great anguish. He began to lose weight, complained of
continual tiredness, became bad-tempered, and his restlessness
greatly increased.
Then one day recently he put on his best clothes and made a
long and difficult journey to a Christian director of souls of
whom he had heard and remained in private conversation
with him for some two hours. He went back home relieved of his
unhappiness, his depression and restlessness, and has since felt
like a different man. During his talk with the adviser he related
an incident that had preyed on his mind at intervals for many
years. Something he heard in the sermon at the service which
started off the acuter symptoms of inward disquiet had made
it impossible for him to continue repressing the ideas and feelings
he had previously been able to control.
The depression and physical unrest from which A. J. suffered
were not identical with his genuine feeling of guilt. The two
phenomena had appeared together. Gloom, despondency and
restlessness occur in people who are not burdened by guilt or
psychic conflicts. They may have a physical origin. Medical
psychology recognises a form of depression or gloom which is
characteristic of a disturbance of the vital bodily rhythms: of the
feeling of ‘coenasthesia’ or general physical wellbeing. Such
a disturbance of physical harmony may be accompanied by
feelings of guilt that are unreal and purely symptomatic.
The same is true of anguish. Medical psychology uses the
term ‘vital anguish’ to describe such a state of mind having an
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