Oedipal Children
If the Oedipal child feels remote from your experience, consider Peter (in chapter 4) as his wife was dying. Despite the fact that he had already decided to divorce her, despite the fact that her illness made her a vengeful, raging harridan, Peter didn’t let himself feel a wish that she would die—yet he still felt guilty. All his tender ministrations and self-sacrifice during her illness couldn’t undo his guilt. Or look ahead to Sharon’s story in chapter 14. Sexually abused as a child, she couldn’t allow herself to experience normal sexual desires. She had to make the men in her life the sexual aggressors, then feel guilty, dirty, and ashamed for letting herself be seduced again. It is a guiding principle of everyday life, but one we’d like to forget about—we feel guilt about feelings and desires without being aware of the feelings and desires themselves.
Now, people with depression hardly let themselves feel any emotion at all. Instead of the normal fluctuations of happiness, sadness, disappointment, joy, desire, and anger that most people cycle through many times a day, depressed people feel a kind of gray neutrality that translates into subterranean tectonic shifts in mood. But even though they aren’t aware of the emotions, they still get to feel guilty about them. When the meek, depressed wife of a bullying husband doesn’t consciously feel angry at his treatment, she will still feel guilty about her rage without even experiencing it. If a man is unaware of his attraction to a coworker, but instead treats her badly out of reaction formation (a primitive defense in which we do the opposite of our wish— what little boys do to little girls they like), he still feels guilty about unacceptable impulses. If my drinking interferes with my ability to work, even though I’m in denial about my drinking, I can still feel guilty. This is one of the great secrets of depression. The depressive is full of guilt about feelings, desires, and impulses he’s not even aware he has.