Who knows what guilt is?

Abstract

Replacing “culpability” with “guilt” is a scientific necessity in criminal law, to synchronize with theories of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry—which speak of the metaphysical nature of the concept, an ontological fact that cannot be proven and is unsusceptible to science. Psychological theories speak of the feeling of guilt linked to the commission of crimes, in which awareness of the fact exists as awareness of guilt—the conscious dimension of the feeling of guilt—which can determine the confession of the fact and other effects. But psychoanalytic theory has another explanation: the feeling of guilt results from the action of the superego (originating from the Oedipus complex) on the ego, the coherent organization of psychic processes to adapt the pleasure principle to the reality principle, among other tasks. The psychoanalytic thesis on the relationship between the impulse to punish and the need to punish discovered the criminal through guilt, in which it is not the crime that produces the feeling of guilt, but the feeling of guilt that produces the crime. Finally, the common thesis of the psychological and social sciences is the absolute incompatibility between guilt and punishment, whose political function is to guarantee social inequality in capitalist societies.