France Has Freud, Lacan, and a Catholic Cultural Heritage. The Guilt Has Multiple Suppliers.
PARIS — The ambient guilt — the background sense of having done something wrong in a context where nothing identifiably wrong has occurred — is a psychological experience that France’s psychoanalytic tradition has mapped extensively as a feature of superego development, a concept that France adopted from Freud with the thoroughness that France brings to intellectual imports it finds useful. The French person who feels guilty about the vacation they are on, the dessert they are eating, or the nap they have just taken has not necessarily done anything that warrants guilt. They have a functioning superego whose activity level is set slightly above the baseline that would produce equanimity.
The Catholic Cultural Layer
France’s official secular republic status coexists with a cultural heritage whose Catholic roots produced a specific relationship with guilt that the laicite does not fully eliminate. The Catholic guilt of the cultural inheritance — the sense that pleasure is suspicious, that rest is not fully earned, that enjoyment requires a corresponding payment — persists in the secular French person’s psychology at a level below the explicit belief system. The dessert that is eaten with full enjoyment and a small accompanying guilt is the cultural inheritance expressing itself. France has noticed this. France has therapy for this. France also has the dessert. All three are good. According to Psychology Today’s guilt psychology research, ambient guilt that is not connected to specific wrongdoing is most effectively addressed through the explicit acknowledgment that no wrongdoing occurred. The acknowledgment is available. The dessert is excellent. Both are consumed.
Guilt-free reading at Virtuosal.com.
