Ontological guilt
Rollo May's The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology came out in 1983. Its seventh chapter is called "Anxiety and Guilt as Ontological". The same text first appeared in 1958, in May's own chapter of Existence, the book that brought the European existential analysts to American readers.
Most of the chapter is about anxiety. Guilt comes near the end, and it grows out of what came before. The kind of guilt May describes there does not need a deed.
From anxiety to guilt
For May, anxiety is not one feeling among others. It is the experience of a threat to a person's being itself. It appears where something new becomes possible. A possibility opens, and with it the chance that it will not be lived.
Guilt, in the chapter, is the other side of that moment. When a person denies a possibility, or fails to live it out, the result is guilt. May concludes that guilt, like anxiety, belongs to the structure of human existence. That is what the word "ontological" means here: it concerns being, not conduct.
Ordinary guilt has an object. Someone broke a rule, lied, or hurt someone. The guilt May describes can arise in a person who has done nothing wrong. It concerns what the person did not become.
May's account of anxiety has its own page, The Meaning of Anxiety. This one stays with guilt.
A dream of a bell tower
May illustrates the idea with a case from Medard Boss, a Swiss psychiatrist. The patient was a physician with a severe obsession about washing and cleanliness. He had been analysed before, first along Freudian lines and then along Jungian ones.
He had a recurrent dream of church steeples. The Freudian analysis read them as phallic symbols, the Jungian one as archetypes. The patient could discuss both readings intelligently. His compulsions went on as before.
With Boss, he first dreamed of a toilet door that was always locked. Later came a dream in which he got through the door and found himself in a church. He stood waist-deep in feces. A rope around his waist was pulling him up toward the bell tower.
Guilty, not only feeling guilty
Boss read the case differently from both earlier analysts. The patient, he said, had locked up essential potentialities in himself, both bodily and spiritual. May quotes Boss directly here. A person who locks up potentialities is guilty, or indebted, as the German word also allows, toward what was given to them at their origin.
May stresses a detail of wording. Boss says the patient is guilty, not merely that he has guilt feelings. May calls this a serious statement. In his view, treating guilt only as a feeling risks calling a real experience unreal.
He adds straight away that this has nothing to do with judging the patient. It means taking the patient's life and experience seriously. Then he names what the case has shown.
"We have cited only one form of ontological guilt—namely, that arising from forfeiting one's own potentialities."
— Rollo May, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology (New York: Norton, 1983), chapter 7, "Anxiety and Guilt as Ontological", p. 115
The other two forms
The sentence opens a short list. May names three forms of ontological guilt. Each corresponds roughly to one of the three modes of world, which the same book defines in a later chapter.
The forfeiting of potentialities belongs to the Eigenwelt, a person's relationship to themselves. The second form concerns other people and belongs to the Mitwelt. The third is a guilt of separation from nature as a whole, which corresponds to the Umwelt. May admits this last one is the hardest to explain briefly.
The three modes themselves are covered on a separate page, Umwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt.
Four characteristics
May closes the section with four features of ontological guilt.
First, everyone takes part in it. No one fully lives out their potentialities. May links this back to the dream. A person stands in a dialectical relation to their own possibilities, the way Boss's patient hung between the feces and the bell tower.
Second, it does not come from cultural prohibitions or from rules taken over from parents. It is rooted in self-awareness. A person is guilty in this sense because they can see themselves as someone who chooses, or fails to choose.
Third, it is not the same as neurotic guilt. In May's view, neurotic guilt forms when ontological guilt is not faced.
Fourth, it does not produce symptoms. May says its effects on the personality can be constructive. He names humility, sharper sensitivity in relationships, and more creativity in the use of one's own potentialities.
A guilt without a deed
The concept can sound harsh, as if it were a verdict on a wasted life. May treats the unlived possibility as part of being human, since no one lives all of theirs.
Guilt is usually traced back to something done. Here it points at something not done, and often at something no one else noticed was missing. Boss's patient had not wronged anyone. He had kept part of himself locked up, and the dream showed it.
Which of my own possibilities have I left unlived, and do I know it?
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