The Guilt Reaction of Parents of Children with Severe Physical Disease

The author studied 23 parents to test the hypothesis that psychological processes other than the classical process might explain the inappropriate guilt reaction of parents of severely ill children. Some of the parents did suffer guilt for reasons described by the classical process—i.e., it was related to unconscious hostility toward the child—but the guilt of some of the others is more readily explained by the alternative hypothesis that it represents an attempt at control of the uncontrollable. In some parents neither mechanism seemed to be operative.