Reply #36: Yes, "Guilt applies to acts, shame to more pervasive states"

[Time for change]

That's one of the main points I tried to convey in my OP.

As far as empathy not being the pathway through which guilt can be instilled, it is interesting that you bring up Freud because Rifkin's book takes issue with Freud on several accounts and references various experts in psychology and sociology to do that. I never accepted Freudian psychology, and when my father, who was a Freudian oriented psychologist, was alive, I used to argue with him about it a lot, even as a teenager. Obviously, I didn't have the psychological expertise to argue those points with him, but there were things about Freud's teachings that I instinctively abhorred -- mostly cenering around the feeling that his psychology was very materialistic and ignored aspects of the human soul that were essential to understanding who we are. I believe that there are a lot more psychologists today who would agree with that.

Of course the argument over whether or not guilt can only be produced through empathy is in some essential ways a semantic argument. Depending on how guilt is defined, one can maintain that empathy is an essential component of it, or that it is not. I didn't really address that issue in my OP, in which I allowed for the fact that the constructive aspects of guilt were "potential" -- meaning that sometimes guilt may not be constructive. But maybe guilt is always constructive, depending on how it is defined. If it always is based on empathy, then maybe it is always constructive. What about a situation when someone convinces you to feel guilty about something, based on the fact that, as Freud would say, you had committed actions contrary to what was incorporated into your superego? It seems to me that that is very different from the kind of guilt that is based on empathy. Maybe there should be another word for it. Maybe such a feeling is much closer to shame than it is to guilt.

Just some thoughts.