Guilt Essays: The Psychology Of The Scarlet Letter

The Psychology of the Scarlet Letter

In the overall scheme of emotions, guilt is in the general category of negative feeling states. Specifically, Freud linked the feeling of guilt, and its related emotion of anxiety, to the Oedipal stage of psychosexual development. From a cognitive point of view, guilt is an emotion that people experience because they're convinced they've caused harm. The guilt of emotion follows directly from the thought that you are responsible for someone else's misfortune, whether or not this is the case. People who experience guilt on a chronic basis, according to the cognitive perspective, mistakenly suffer under the illusion that they have caused other people harm. In contrast to the psychodynamic view of guilt, the

This type of guilt may involve harm to others, such causing someone physical or psychological pain. Feeling the emotion of guilt for an action deserving of remorse is normal; to not feel guilty, in these cases, may be a sign of psychopathy. Guilt Cause #2: Guilt for something you didn't do, but want to. Guilt Cause #3: Guilt for something you think you did. If you think you did something wrong, you can experience almost as much guilt as if you actually committed the act or even more. One fairly typical cognitive source of guilt is the magical belief that you can jinx people by thinking about them in a negative or hurtful way. Guilt Cause #4: Guilt that you didn't do enough to help someone. Adding to the overall emotional drain of the situation is the guilt you overlay on top of the fatigue because you think you should be doing more. Guilt Cause #5: Guilt that you're doing better than someone else. Survivor guilt also occurs when people who lose families, friends, or neighbors in disasters themselves remain untouched or, at least, alive. Applying not only to people who live when others in the same situation have died, though, survivor guilt also characterizes those who make a better life for

Even with the major sin of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger's sins are much greater. First Roger knows that he never really did love Hester and says he did wrong by marrying such a young wife that also didn't love him. But Roger doesn't notice his second sin, taking revenge on Arthur Dimmesdale. An example of this is, "We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!" Because Chillingworth's sin was the blackest his fate was the most horrible of the