Mona Chollet autopsy the causes of guilt

Feeling guilty about not working enough, struggling to reconcile family and professional life, feeling like you are not taking good enough care of your child. These are some examples of ordinary self-flagellation that concern many people, especially women. Mona Chollet, author of “Witches” and “Reinventing Love”, analyzes them in “Resisting Guilt. On some obstacles to existing.”

This new work, which was an immediate success, seems to tackle a theme relating to personal development. This would misinterpret the intentions of an author who is careful not to give recipes, but seeks to “understand what various powers have done to us and continue to do to us, rather than adding additional pressure to us by prescribing the reaction which would be most appropriate.

Drawing on a corpus of essayists, scientists, historians, both French and English, Mona Chollet also evokes, as usual, her personal experience. Who also gave birth to this work. Building on the success of her previous publications, the Franco-Swiss born in Geneva left her job as a journalist to devote herself to writing. But now, despite a temporal boulevard reassigned solely to the development of her books, she discovers herself much less productive than expected. Instead, a guilt emerges linked to the time thus “lost”, which she begins to observe as a sociological fact.

This little critical voice is so well anchored within us that it becomes an “inner enemy” that we no longer notice. Mona Chollet therefore shines a light on what fuels this self-deprecating discourse. There we find expected explanations, such as the weight of the Christian religion, which fuels the idea that all suffering results from a fault. A motivation which seems all the more important when it comes to women, willingly brought back for a long time to Eve the temptress.

Women also find themselves constantly subjected to contradictory messages such as: “Stop apologizing,” while at the same time they are still expected to be humble and modest. Much more dramatic is the feeling of guilt that rape victims feel, even though they are the ones attacked.

A little-known quarrel

This generalized guilt of half of humanity is not only due to religious tradition, it also stems, according to Mona Chollet, from the “women’s quarrel”, a controversy over their supposed inferiority born in the Middle Ages, and which lasted until… XX^e century. Have you never heard of it? No wonder: historians have barely mentioned it. However, the controversy kept women away from university benches until the second half of the 19th century.^e century.

The author also analyzes other forms of guilt: that of children, that of mothers who must be perfect, and that of all people who work, constantly suspected of not doing enough in this society of performance.

And new opportunities to blame each other constantly emerge, like feminists who constantly monitor themselves, for fear of letting an ambiguous wording slip, or activists who censor themselves, fearing being stigmatized for the slightest deviation from the cause.

Citing the philosopher and psychoanalyst Elsa Godart, she recalls that guilt rhymes with domination. What to do then? As we have said, the author does not give recipes. In this essay, as dense as it is fascinating, she only encourages us to “rediscover the unstoppable strength… of our legitimacy, of our value, of our fundamental innocence in the face of all powers”.

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