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THE REAL GUILT FEELING
guilt experiences of certain people material for appraisal and
judgment has been obtained, and the conclusion has been drawn
that in this material is to be found the full explanation of the
guilty person’s behaviour and emotional situation. This is a
mistake. The most real and deep guilt feelings always contain
an element beyond what is accessable to examination.
Remorse and Guilt Feeling
Related to the real guilt feeling is remorse. In it there is an
active element. It is purposive. It includes striving and an aim.
The person who feels remorse desires to treat his guilt as guilt.
It is this active element which is lacking in the aesthetic guilt
feeling. This active element contrasts also with the active
willto-flight which is met with where fear of punishment is
dominant.
A Swedish psychologist, Gustav Lundgren,! deals with the
question of remorse in one of his books. He draws attention to
the erroneous conception of our mental life which denies that
remorse has meaning. The argument is that since the past is
past and cannot be undone, feelings of remorse are useless and
unreal. This point of view has had an influence that prevents
us from understanding the nature of mental life. There is a
great difference between the events of this life and the sequence
of temporal events. In the physical world events are in
continuous movement. There is always a ‘before’ and an ‘after’.
That which has occurred cannot be erased by anything that
happens subsequently. The stream of time cannot be turned
back. But mental life is governed by other laws. Past,
present and future are simultaneously present to consciousness.
The past exists in the present of personal being as ‘meaning’,
and it can be changed or remade. An intimate connection exists
between all aspects of the soul’s existence, and in the most
literal sense it can be a revolutionising experience to make the
old new. The memories of the soul do not lie in caskets like
inanimate objects preserved in a museum. Just as an inscription
carved upon the bark of a sapling changes as the tree grows, so
memories change as personality develops.
Remorse begins when we remind ourselves of the past by
1 Hur skall det ga med Människan? Stockholm, 1938.
153
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