ABSTRACT
Guilt and shame are affects commonly linked in discussions of the "bad" feelings human beings own. This chapter begins with several reasons. One is that, depending on which clinical material you read, there are well-founded arguments for the proposition that guilt and shame are equally part of the human condition and, therefore, both implicated in conditions of trauma. Even in the earliest literature that has come down to us, guilt and shame are both present in human history, whether implicitly or explicitly denoted. The second, however, concerns a paradox in her own research. While several of her, ordinary Jewish, interviewees talked about feelings of guilt arising in relation to the Holocaust, apart from some passing references almost no one mentioned shame as an emotion consciously experienced in this context, and in one or two cases, the idea was even actively discounted. There was, however, one notable exception who saw shame as central to his, and Jewish people's, traumatic experience.
