Survivor guilt

Introduction ¹

Survivor guilt is a term coined to encapsulate the ‘ever present feeling of guilt accompanied by conscious or unconscious dread of punishment for having survived the very calamity to which their loved ones succumbed’ (Niederland, 1961: 238). This guilt has been described as ubiquitous and relentless among Holocaust survivors (Krystal and Niederland, 1971). While our team confirms that guilt is unabating for those who suffer from it, we do nonetheless encounter some survivors who do not exhibit manifest guilt. ²

There is a dissonant perspective among clinicians regarding survivor guilt. My colleagues and I find clinically that most Holocaust survivors tend to verbalize their guilt, but few can explain its rationale or elaborate on their culpability. When the rationale is explicitly presented by survivors, clinicians are often faced by a guilt reaction which makes little empirical sense:

[A] striking feature of survivor guilt is the contrast between the torment of self-blame of survivors and their innocence by any objective criteria. For instance, Holocaust survivors often blamed themselves for not following or saving their murdered loved ones, when objectively they were torn apart at gunpoint or through physical force. Children blamed themselves for the deaths of their parents while they were hidden and survived. (Valent, 2000: 556)

This paper explores alternate formulations of how guilt emerges in our population, the role it plays in the lives of survivors, whether and how guilt is adaptive, and how it interacts with other motifs which generate personality and pathology. The elements gleaned in diagnostics and psychotherapy are illustrated with brief narratives of Holocaust survivors (at times paraphrasing their explanations) to elucidate the analyses as needed.

Guilt with and without culpability

The type of guilt most familiar to all is personal guilt, which often has an interpersonal focus. A common theme of personal guilt among survivors is one of self-blame for the tragedies that befell others during the Holocaust (Garwood, 1996). Somehow, they see themselves as the cause of others’ deaths. In some cases, they will refer to actual events where others were hurt because of the survivors’ behaviors. Here is a typical guilt statement I have often heard from survivors:

I feel guilty for the demise of others who did not make it – either because of what I did to them or because of my failure to help them.

I suggest that survivor guilt spans a wide spectrum, including a distinct range of ‘guilt’ devoid of culpability. In legal terminology, culpability implies purposeful wrongdoing. A person is judged culpable if his or her conduct is blameworthy and deserving of punishment (Crocker, 1997). I define non-culpable guilt as blame-worthiness which is not referenced to intentional harmful behaviors. Its essential feature is the lack of personal responsibility on the part of the survivor. Clinically, its pathological repercussions are less severe than those of personal guilt. ³

As a prime example of non-culpable guilt consistent with Niederland’s (1964) seminal definition of survivor guilt, survivors are sometimes preoccupied by a nagging idea that had they been killed, others would have been spared. Diverging from Niederland’s conceptualization of survival guilt, Lifton (1991) concretizes this stance as death guilt under the rubric of survivor priority, based on a notion of a death quota by fate or a formula of a finite quantum of resources (Modell, 1971). In the Holocaust, this was in fact often a reality, as the Nazis frequently worked under death quotas, where the singular SS missive of the day was to murder a specific number of Jews:

I feel guilty for surviving. Others died because I did not. It’s not that I did something to them, but that’s how things worked out in the larger scheme.

Alas, guilt without culpability has the potential of reframing victims as perpetrators by misattributing negative consequences of an event to the very victims who were merely hapless pawns in a tragedy. Thus, events which result in an offense often engender vilification and shaming of those who are themselves victims of the events, and result in the spurious inculcation of guilt in those who have no culpability for the offense. ⁴

Consider a Talmudic discussion about life and death choice (Yerushalmi Terumot 8:12; Tosefta Terumot 7:23) in situations which evoke the gruesome scenery in Holocaust death camps. Under adjudication are moral behavioral guidelines for victims who are forced to play a role in the death of others. A scenario where one victim is threatened by death if he or she does not kill one of his/her peers – is contrasted with another scenario where an immobilized victim is thrown on an infant resulting in the child’s death. The Talmudic sages rule that one must refuse to directly kill his peer even if it precipitates one’s own demise, but that one is not obligated to resist being used as a passive killing object if such refusal would prompt one’s own murder. Contemplating my projected experience in the ‘passive’ case, I imagine that if I were forcefully bound up with rope and thrown on an infant, I would feel guilty about the murder – even though there was no way I could have prevented it. The mere fact that I was an instrument of the atrocity would incur guilt within my soul. Introspecting, it is clear that I would feel no culpability for the atrocity. Both the child and I are actual victims. I did not commit an evil deed here, nor did I have a malevolent intention. Nonetheless, a guilt reaction would be activated because I would see myself as partially responsible.

Many people have an unarticulated, and perhaps merely implicit, sense of a just world – an orientation which has significant repercussions for violence victims (Montada and Lerner, 1988). In cases of uneven repercussions to a group of victims – especially when some died while others survived – survivors may well have a tacit assumption that those who died somehow deserved their fate while they merited life. I posit that this dynamic can be appealed to, as well, in the guilt that survivors may experience – not for what they did, but for their very survival – which they and others may construe as an affront to those who did not survive.

A deplorable analogous social phenomenon in non-Western culture elucidates this stance of guilt engendered by the very victim role. Women who are sexually molested are routinely viewed in certain societies as ‘bringing shame’ to their families. Indeed, certain cultures actually punish these victims. Moreover, honor killings of such victims by their own family members are quite common (Goldstein, 2002). Even in our ‘more civilized’ culture, rape victims are routinely stigmatized. While there is a misogynist under-current of thought here that rape victims are usually complicit and responsible for their abuse, I am incredulous that this aberrant attribution sufficiently explains the stigmatization and vilification of these hapless women. I posit that the antipathy is not based on attribution of intent at all. Instead, the very fact that the victim is associated with the humiliating event evokes a negative reaction in others – a judgmental attribution which spills over to the entire family – who certainly had no part in the victimization of its own daughter. And, yes! I can certainly empathize with the feelings of the victim that she is responsible for the disgrace of her family even though she takes no responsibility for it. These victims actually feel guilt for besmirching the family. It is the essence of this feeling which I believe defines the overall nature of survivor guilt – guilt without culpability.

I conceptualize non-culpable survival guilt along the same lines as blaming rape victims, consistent with the sense of responsibility felt by the hypothetical Talmudic victim used as a ‘battering ram’ to murder a child:

I am the one who was instrumental in causing the death of the child, even though I was totally powerless to prevent it.

When we see others who are idealized that perish, we may conclude that we certainly have no greater claim to life than they did (Odets, 1995). ⁵ Moreover, survivors who view themselves to be of minimal merit often depict their life as an insult to those far worthier who perished. In a sense, their survival impugns the worthiness of the murdered victims. Thus, survival might be interpreted as an affront, even in the absence of concomitant intent on the part of the survivor. Being held responsible for the connotations of surviving which are unrelated to one’s intention (or even one’s thinking) can be disconcerting and most difficult to content with:

I feel that I offended the dead by surviving, and that I continue to offend them by still being alive.

Modell (1965) expands the construct of survivor guilt beyond the context of aggression or calamities, positing that its dynamics are just as relevant to any situation where one fares better than one’s peers or in-group. The underlying (albeit questionable) assumption of these hapless victims is captured by a common fantasy that the sum quantity of love or good fortune necessarily remains finite within a family unit: ‘[If] one has something good, it is at the expense of someone else being deprived’ (Modell, 1971: 342). Presumably, this feeling incurs discomfort which is labeled by Friedman (1985) as depletion guilt. ⁶ Remarkably, Modell posits that individuals often diminish their own well-being because they feel that they ‘have no right’ to live better than another. In some instances, there is a feeling that others are being hurt when they are surpassed (Bush, 1989) – a phenomenon which has been conceptualized by some theorists as inequity guilt (Baumeister et al., 1994). ⁷ This pattern is thus not dynamically related to survival at all. We suggest, moreover, that the feelings may instead reflect, for some survivors, existential feelings of unworthiness with no guilt at all.

Psychodynamic transformations of guilt

Among survivor patients, survivor guilt may entail a transformation or re-translation of other guilt which is repressed, but finds disguised expression in what is erroneously experienced as survivor guilt. For some survivors, the original guilt, which is not faced consciously, predates the Holocaust. Psychodynamically, the survivor unconsciously opts to negate the content of this guilt, while still experiencing its negative feelings and self-recriminations disguised as Holocaust-related guilt.

Survivors whose guilt is truly Holocaust related often find inexplicably that it threatens their sense of propriety. Psychoanalytically, one may wonder whether the guilt may be engendered by unconscious negative feelings toward the loved ones who did not survive – feelings which are then construed (unconsciously and primitively) as the cause of the loved one’s death. For example, some survivors harbor unconscious negative feelings toward loved ones who perished in the Holocaust. Other survivors may endorse an implicit rule-of-thumb that bad things happen to bad people, which prompts them to assume that those who perished deserved their fate. This translates into a stance of ‘blaming the victim’ (Jenkins, 1985). Alas, the taboo against ‘speaking ill of the dead’ results in guilt feelings which are not acknowledged but repressed, ⁸ and find expression as unexplainable punitive survivor guilt. ⁹

There is a defensive tendency among violence victims to internalize negative attitudes of perpetrators when confronted by uncontrollable aggression. Powerless victims, in particular, tend to accept the aspersions of evil and unworthiness fostered by their oppressors. This response was conceptualized by Anna Freud (1937) as the defense mechanism of identification with the aggressor. This mode is prevalent in some Holocaust survivors who internalize this negativity with little insight into their defensive process. Instead, they erroneously construe their self-loathing and self-deprecation as survivor guilt.

Internalizing abusive attributions has led a number of Jewish Holocaust survivors to disavow their Jewish identity (Kessel, 2000). It is suggested that the notion of frustration and disenchantment with Judaism was an underlying theme even for the majority of survivors who chose to suppress such potentially disturbing thoughts. More markedly, some survivors show repressed anger toward God for His role in the Holocaust (Juni, 2015). The threat of blasphemy, a strong religious taboo, closes off conscious access to anti-God and anti-Jewish ideation, but the guilt it engenders remains potent – eventually finding expression in survivor guilt.

Based on my clinical work and that of my team, I propose an elaboration based on developmental stage theory, rather than a dynamic formulation of survival guilt, to accommodate those survivors who do not seem to fit the above noted analytic formulations. Crucial to this approach is the finding that victims of violence sometimes experience guilt for being unable to control Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms (Schiraldi, 2000). I believe that this phenomenon can be best explained by appealing to a re-interpretation of the childhood developmental polarity between initiative and guilt first documented by Erikson (1959). ¹⁰ The initiative-guilt dialectic, which is stamped into our ego algorithm, is intuitively plausible. In many instances, one can envision that exercising initiative can prevent harm. Iconically, guilt takes the form of I should have done something to avoid it. Thus, when initiative was not forthcoming, guilt may be seen as a reasonable repercussion. Based on reactions of survivors, it is posited that guilt is developmentally inculcated into personality as a counterpart to initiative. Guilt is thus elicited automatically whenever initiative is abandoned – persisting even in situations where initiative would not have been effective. Thus, even though Holocaust victims typically could not have taken the initiative to avert catastrophe, they would still experience guilt as a natural developmentally programmed repercussion. ¹¹

The adaptive function of guilt

I take the psychodynamic approach that guilt does not entail a breakdown of functioning. Instead, it is an adaptive ego response to perceived threat (Tangney and Dearing, 2002). I find clinically that survivors utilize guilt along three strategies: damage control, relationship maintenance, and avoidance of unacceptable affect.

Survivor guilt = guilt for surviving?

Practitioners who work with survivors have expanded the construct well beyond Holocaust survivors themselves to include therapists. Consider, for example, Danieli’s (1984) concept of ‘bystander’s guilt’ and Herman’s (1992) notion of ‘witness guilt’ to capture the helplessness of therapists in alleviating the pain and horror of survivors.

I also note that a number of the elements in so-called survival guilt are linked to the experience of being in a life-threatening situation, and not to survival as such. Moreover, a number of these elements would also apply to life-threatening events which did not threaten the life of the victim (e.g. non-New Yorkers during the World Trade Center destruction). Consider, for example, Rabbi Joseph Carlebach who refused special accommodation offered by the Nazis and joined his Hamburg congregation in the death camp (Carlebach, 2008), as well as the decision of Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman to travel from the United States to Baranovich, Poland to perish with his students during the Holocaust (Fendel, 2004). ¹⁸ My mother’s decision during the Holocaust is a personal example of this motif:

I was living and working in Budapest until 1944, posing as a gentile. When I heard that the Nazis were rounding up the Jews from my hometown in Czechoslovakia and sending them to the death camps, I decided to join my family. I proceeded to the main train terminal to purchase a ticket when I was accosted by a Hungarian policeman who asked me: ‘Are you Jewish?’ I decided that there was no way I would deign to hide my faith and responded empathically: ‘Yes, I am.’ I was promptly arrested and deported. Except for one brother who was in Romania at the time and survived, I never saw my parents or siblings again.

There is a remarkable clinical phenomenon I notice among some second-generation Holocaust survivors. At the dynamic level, some patients incongruously find themselves grappling with distinct feeling of ‘survivor guilt’ about the Holocaust – a period which predated them by years. The verbalizations are similar to those of their parents:

I feel guilty that I can lead a normal life when my grandparents (or brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts) were all murdered.

As I see it, the clinical presentation of these painful reactions shared by Holocaust victims, bystanders, therapists, and second-generation survivors is entirely consistent with those of family members and close friends of assault victims (including some who did not witness the assaults but, instead, learned about it indirectly) who present with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. ¹⁹

Survivor guilt as a primitive superego reaction

A common thread in the conceptualizations in this paper is an explanation of some sort – be it cognitive or religio-philosophical or emotional or based on the justice of equity – for the guilt experienced by those who are somehow connected to atrocities, even if they are not technically survivors. I would like to propose a phenomenological algorithm to capture the process of survivor guilt by appealing to the primitive punitive superego which would be internalized from an irrationally harsh environment. Permit me to dramatize this phenomenology by allegorizing the superego to an internalized moral prosecutor hounding the survivor with a structure characterized by an absurdly concrete distillation of reality: ²⁰

I suggest that this primitive orientation – by its very illogic – is a plausible explanation which captures the commonalities among the various diffuse elucidations of survivor guilt among Holocaust survivors, even as it solidifies a stance of perpetual internal self-damnation which is impervious to amelioration because of its irrationality.

Is survivor guilt intrapersonal or transpersonal?

The guilt literature generally falls into two different domains: altruistic and deontological (Gangemi and Mancini, 2011). Altruistic guilt is prompted by a failure of concern for others (Baumeister et al., 1994). Essentially this can be construed as transpersonal guilt. Deontological guilt entails the failure to live up to a certain values which are not transpersonal. ²¹

While the construct of survivor guilt is typically mentioned in contexts where one is spared while others are not, it is not at all clear whether the latter aspect is necessary to the conceptualization. A number of the rationales and elaborations of survivor guilt by survivors seem to lend themselves equally well to scenarios where there was no other victim.

Consider, for example, the situation where survivors utilize the defensive response of Identification with the aggressor to rationalize unjustified aggression toward those who perished by justifying the abuse – which then induces ‘survivor guilt’ as an internalization of the hostility of the aggressor toward the survivor. However, one can posit that even if there are no other victims, a person who is attacked unjustifiably may very well resort to Identification with the aggressor to ‘make sense’ of the abuse. Indeed, this is just what occurred when Patty Hearst was kidnapped and severely abused in 1974 by radical militants, only to turn around and join her captors in their antisocial activities (LaViolette and Barnett, 2013). Once a self-directed hostile stance becomes internalized, it is reasonable that the self-accusatory aspects of the orientation will entail guilt as a justification of the abuse. It is noteworthy that removal of guilt is a major focus of deprogramming cult members (Dubrow-Eichel, 1989), hostages (Speckhard et al., 2005), and prisoners of war (Zimbardo et al., 1977). ²²

A cognitive reinterpretation of guilt

The inner world of obsessive-compulsive patients is governed by a pervasive web of should and should not rules. Traditional psychoanalytic theory interprets these rules as distorted products of moral codes which became concretized into unrelated behaviors through a variety of associations and symbolisms (Fischer and Juni, 1981, 1982; Juni, 1987). Based on my recent clinical and research experience with obsessive-compulsive patients, I have come to appreciate a world of should which is not at all based on moral values – neither altruistic nor related to (deontological) personal moral values. Instead, I see this orientation grounded within a should-referenced order and allegiance to the course of events that is supposed to occur.

I must add that, in view of my psychoanalytic appreciation of human motivation, I see this orientation as a developmental outgrowth of traditional superego formation – a formation which began with a should of prescribed and proscribed behaviors which were derived from moral imperatives, but then became decontextualized into shoulds which were merely linked to expectancies which had no moral basis. ²³

The resultant superego-resembling mandate is: Do not interfere with order. Diverting events from their predestined course is wrong. If one’s life is changed from his or her own destiny (what it was supposed to be), then that is wrong. More dramatically, if I managed to stay alive after an ordeal where – by all rights – I should have perished – then I am guilty (so to speak) of violating the natural order of things. (As in the primary superego dynamic, such wrongness will produce guilt, since it violates the perceived mandated script.) From this perspective, it is not at all surprising that research shows deontological guilt to be most prominent in obsessive-compulsive patients (Mancini et al., 2008).

My work with compulsive patients has led me to conclude that the deontological heuristic for moral decisions – which Sunstein (2005: 539) encapsulates by the maxim of ‘Do not play God’ – actually falls more within the domain of the cognitive than the moral. Guilt, if present at all, is not related to an internal sense of morality, but derives from a perceived sense of disorder. Essentially, this is not an emotional reaction but one much closer to cognitive dissonance. As I see it, some individuals have the notion that there is a proper way in which events should unfold, where the should is essentially an expression of expectation rather than a moral imperative. By some transformation – perhaps a cognitive transformation hinging on the dual function of should in the language domain – the violation of such an expectation leads to feelings of dissonance. It is quite feasible that such dissonance will be perceived as anxiety by some individuals. Indeed, Kelly (1955) construes anxiety as a result of cognitive dissonance. As Kelly sees it, anxiety is merely the sensation one feels when events deviate from expectations. Applying this orientation to our population, I posit that what is described by some as survivor guilt actually derives from an assessment that important life events are not proceeding according to plan. As such, I question whether deontological guilt is a misnomer; perhaps deontological dissonance more aptly describes the phenomenon.

Summary and conclusion

The construct of survivor guilt encompasses a range of phenomena, including personal guilt for what one may have done (or felt or thought), passive guilt (for what one failed to do), guilt without culpability, guilt for the implications of one’s survival, and inequity guilt. It may serve the function of damage control, as a rationale for victimization, as a form of punishment, as a tool to gain a sense of control or mastery over chaos, as a maneuver to preempt further punishment, as a method to avoid facing harsher emotional implications, or as a means of maintaining a relationship not otherwise feasible. It may be experienced by survivors, victims, and others who are peripherally related to them.

From the perspective of the Parsimony Principle, ²⁴ one cannot help but consider these large range spectra as suggesting that survivor guilt is a post hoc interpretation. I propose that their underlying unifying construct is discomfort (often diffuse) which survivors erroneously label as guilt for lack of a better description. Based on the elusiveness of survivors’ guilt elaboration by survivors and its often inherent illogic, I conclude that survivor guilt is a misnomer on two counts:

The essential elements of the construct are linked to the experience of victimization rather than survival. It pertains to all victims, including non-survivors. Moreover, it need not pertain to a situation where others did not survive. In addition, victimization need not be personal to elicit the response. Survivor guilt may be a mere function of exposure to a traumatic event – even if indirect (e.g. family members who hear first hand about the event, therapists who treat trauma victims, second-generation Holocaust survivors who learn about horrors which occurred long before they were born);

I also note that some survivors who believe that the Holocaust was intentionally orchestrated by God (and perhaps even those who believe in destiny based on fate alone) experience dread which relates neither to survival nor to guilt. Accepting the premise that one is no more worthy than those who were murdered, these victims simply anticipate upcoming annihilation similar to the rest of their cohort, and therefore engender internal guilt to ward off that anxiety.

Nonetheless, it is certain that many survivors do experience subjective guilt which they attribute to the fact that they survived while so many other did not. As such, I see the construct as a useful ‘verbal encapsulation’ of how survivors construe their experience, even as we dispute its emotional, dynamic, and empirical validity.