Product Description

We don't have to read books to learn a great deal about guilt. It seeps in through our pores, our eyes and our ears. Not a word has to be spoken. We can remember that look we got from our elders and the shock waves of humiliation and pain that suffused our minds and bodies. It would have been easier and less painful if we could have learned it all by just reading. The reading comes later when we are trying to understand and comfort the pain.

A refreshingly unconventional look at the role of sin and guilt in our lives, Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way is the result of more than twenty years of thought and writing. It is also the result of many years of clinical work by a 76 year-old psychoanalyst who is still practicing. Lawrence Staples concludes that we must eat forbidden fruit and bear guilt if we are to grow and achieve our full potential. His unorthodox view has the potential not only to change the way we look at guilt but also to soften its effects and heal us.

The conventional view of guilt is that it helps us remain "good." It helps us resist doing things that would disturb or harm our individual and collective interests. This view of guilt has an important role in the maintenance of conventional life. Yet, the conventional view, important as it is, also creates an enormous problem. It can deter us from being "bad" when that is exactly what is needed. The contribution virtue can make to society must be acknowledged. There indeed are sins that are destructive; there also are sins that benefit. While the conventional view is part of the truth, it is not the whole truth. The meaning of sin and guilt is far more complicated.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #915864 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
After receiving AB and MBA degrees from Harvard, Lawrence spent the next 22 years with a Fortune 500 company, where he became an officer and a corporate vice president. When he was 50, he made a midlife career change and entered the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, where he spent nine years in training to become a psychoanalyst. He is now a licensed psychoanalyst (Jungian) in private practice in Washington, DC. Dr. Staples has a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity.

Customer Reviews

Hang on to your Belief Systems. They are about to be Challenged!
Now and then along comes a little book that opens our eyes to viewing the world the way we have been taught or trained to perceive it, and after reading it, the way we react to events in our lives is altered - for the better. Such is the experience that happens to the reader fortunate enough to encounter GUILT WITH A TWIST: THE PROMETHEAN WAY by Dr. Lawrence H. Staples, a Jungian psychologist who just happens to write very well indeed! It may take a few repeat readings of this book to fully appreciate what Staples is offering as a change in thought process, but the journey is well worth it.

In Dr. Staples words: "We have to sin and incur guilt if we are to grow and reach our full potential." He goes on to explain that the message of this book "is inspired and informed by the myth of Prometheus. Myth tells us Prometheus stole fire from the gods and made it available for use by humans. He suffered for his sin. Zeus had him chained to a rock where an eagle pecked and tore daily at his liver. But human society would have suffered if he had not committed it. Thus, the life of Prometheus portrays a mythological model for guilt that is different from the conventional view. The Promethean model of guilt suggests the importance of sinning and incurring guilt in order to obtain needed--but forbidden things".

Staples explains how our conventional view of guilt is that it keeps us 'good', providing a safe fence within which we can function without the fear of doing bad things. But he quickly dismantles that belief by citing examples from not only mythical but also historical figures whose 'sins' resulted in changes that benefitted society as a whole. His theory is that if we cannot sin and suffer guilt, we cannot fully develop our potential as human beings, individuals that form the Jungian Collective but who have the strength of character to individuate into unique givers to the whole by taking the risk of sinning and guilt that accompany potentially great changes. As in the case of Prometheus, we might keep the fire for ourselves, instead of defying the gods and giving it (a sin) to human beings.

It may take a while to wrap around Staples' thoughts and ideas, but the slow acceptance of thinking outside the box results in recognizing the potential that is in each of us: sin > guilt > change. As Staples summarizes it: "Life inevitably confronts us with the Promethean dilemma: Do we live our lives without fire and the heat and light it provides or do we sin, and subsequently incur guilt, in order to obtain for ourselves and for society those important changes and developments that we need?" While the content of this book demands the reader's full attention, the possibilities for changing not only ourselves but also society seem endless. A tough but fascinating and challenging read! Grady Harp, April 08

Good Guilt????
"Good Guilt?" Until I had the privilege of reading Lawrence H. Staples' 'Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way' guilt was something that I ran and hid from, and most certainly tried to pitch it out with all those other uncomfortable feelings that have a way of clouding up an otherwise perfectly sunny day. Lawrence Staples bumps us up against the 'tip of the guiltberg' and then guides us down into the murky depths of our beings were the raging, or occasionally subtle, sources of guilt are discovered - good, bad, and at times even indifferent.

With a spirit similar to what moved Galileo, Copernicus, Socrates, Rosa Parks, and Susan B. Anthony to violate conventional boundaries, 'Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way' suggests that 'Good Guilt' is incurred for the sins we need to commit if we are to grow and reach our full potential as individuals, as well as a society. "'Sins' that benefit us," Staples claims, "could not be committed without a creative, Promethean spirit that is supported by an obstinate and irreverent insolence toward authority that is informed by a love of freedom."

Staples shows us how guilt may not particularly feel so 'good' at the time of a transgression, yet in retrospect the perceived 'sin' that originated feelings of guilt often turns out to be of great value materially, as well as spiritually. This timely publication sheds light and brings valuable meaning to feelings that for ages humanity has deemed 'bad' and undesirable and will benefit many who suffer from life's existential pains brought on by divorce, separations, addictions, and a host of socially imposed rules that crush the spirits of those who challenge prejudice attitudes toward race, religion, gender, and other social norms.

Rethinking Guilt
It's always easy to like a book with which you instantly agree. We embrace the familiar, the similar, the types of things made of the same prima materia with which we've built our beliefs. But so much the better when an idea, a thesis, a text that we at first reject wins us over through a mix of solid research, real-life examples, and strong writing. Such is the case with my experience of Guilt with a Twist.

In the Overview, Dr. Staples states: "We have to sin and incur guilt, if we are to grow and reach our full potential" (xv). Being a "lapsed" Catholic who had often experienced guilt as a weapon and thought the concept of "Original Sin" or having to confess your sins to an intermediary was nothing but power-clenching propaganda on the part of the Church, I found myself inching toward dismissing the book entirely, a feeling that persisted as I continued through the first section.

The idea here is that there is "Good Guilt," as demonstrated by such historical luminaries as Socrates, Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, and Galileo (and the mythical Prometheus). In other words, we do things that break the rules of the times or are considered "sins" to perpetrate a greater good, to achieve a higher purpose.

After reading about Parks, I made some notes in the margin, as follows:

"She did not sin, nor was she wracked with guilt. Society was wrong."

"Sin is too subjective to standardize guilt and shame as he's done so far."

Oddly enough, on the day I started Guilt with a Twist I read an interview with artist/art dealer Tony Shafrazi who, to protest the Vietnam War, spray-painted "Kill Lies All" across Picasso's Guernica mural (itself a protest piece). He had no guilt about it because his objectives were clear, just like Rosa's must have been.

The moralizing of guilt is, of course, a thorny problem, as there is a world of possibility in making determinations about what is "good," what is a "sin," and just what might be a "greater good" or "higher purpose." After all, the notion of Nietzsche's Übermensch, explored in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, or the phrase "the end justifies the means" open a can of clawed and fanged wyrms ready to rip to shreds the fabric of society.

Lucky for us, Dr. Staples has taken the time to formulate his thesis and elaborate thoroughly upon it in Guilt with a Twist. He draws on many sources and techniques, first and foremost the work of Carl Jung. (Staples is a Jungian analyst who trained in Switzerland after making a mid-life career-switch at the age of 50).

He says: "the urge to sin may be identical with the urge to individuate, a Jungian term for the psychological process by which we become the unique person we are meant to be" (xix). This brought to mind the Nietzschean notion of slaying the dragon of "Thou Shalt." As Jung said, "the shadow, where we hide our sins in secret, is 90% pure gold" (34), which that nasty dragon hordes.

Mapping out the terrain of guilt, Dr. Staples lists three types of authorities: parental, secular, and divine, all of which define "sin" in subtly different but mostly overlapping ways. The expectations put upon us by this triumvirate--from which we must stray in pursuit of our true selves--spark our guilt, leading us to suppress and deny our shadow selves and live what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation."

In chapter 4, Dr. Staples outlines several sources of guilt: sex, abandonment, divorce, negative feelings for parents, anger, negativity, gender roles, selfishness, different sexual orientation, falling short of ideals, truth and lies, renunciation of religious beliefs, alcohol, and feelings.

Of the fourteen sections in chapter 4, I have had direct experience of twelve.

This certainly got my attention.

Anticipating the exploration of opposites in chapter 5, Staples writes: "the sacred and the profane are but two sides of a single underlying reality" (33). Then, in chapter 5 came the key sentence that furthered the connection with my own experiences: "[G]uilt's purpose is not the maintenance of morals; it is the maintenance of the opposites and psychic wholeness" (98).

This is an idea I certainly understand, being a person who juggles many roles (writer, director, editor, father, husband, actor, musician, etc.) and has often felt abundant guilt that the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon was coupling with not giving loved ones enough time and attention and spawning the child Mediocrity.

The pull of opposites is also something I know well, having struggled most of my life with the dynamic of pleasing others versus pleasing myself, and of course, the more I thought about it, the more the role of guilt became clear.

The often contradictory words of my grandmother, a quintessential Italian-American matriarch who recently passed away at 91, also echo in my head. She would say, alternately: "You work too hard! You need to take care of yourself and rest!" and "You've got to make hay while the sun shines!"

Chapter 5 discusses in vibrant detail the play of opposites, how they attract and move apart and how they produce, through the mechanism of guilt, homeostasis and creative output.

For those readers interested in the nexus between quantum physics and spirituality, Dr. Staples speaks about the movement of opposites in terms of the cosmic dance as I've seen it described by authors like Michael Talbot and Fritjof Capra.

As Dr. Staples says, "We keep moving from pole to pole until the ego becomes strong enough to bear the tension of co-existing opposites" (109). Recalling my own 20-plus- year journey on this path and the experiences of Carl Jung as related in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, it is clear that the guilt must be borne if the ego is to achieve its required strength, and the process is never easy but ever required.

Chapter 6, entitled "The Role of Guilt in Creativity and Psychological Development," at 76 pages, is the longest and most appealing chapter in the book to me, given the correlations between the material in chapter 5 and my own life. Dr. Staples extends the notion of dynamic opposites to the masculine/feminine coupling necessary in any creative endeavor. The case studies and historical examples from which Dr. Staples draws are a mini-course in the psychological aspects of creativity and this chapter could be read on its own by any artist seeking to better understand the process.

Approaching the end of chapter 6 and reading a section entitled "Sin, Guilt, and Self-Development," I came upon a timely article on AOL about the Vatican's concern that Catholics are going to confession less and less. There was a poll attached to the article in which 79% of the population still believes in the concept of sin. It's a given that these online polls are far from scientific, but the number is high enough to suggest that a considerable portion of people believe that sin exists, therefore guilt must as well.

Part II of the book, which comprises a single chapter and the Conclusions, is called "Assuaging Guilt," covering both spiritual and psychological approaches (what I have found in my own experience to be a highly useful and well-rounded dual approach to just about any endeavor). Chapter 7 ends with the analysis of five dreams with orientations around guilt. Dr. Staples offers some practical insights in working with dreams in creative and healing ways.

Life is complicated--in these troubled financial and political times more than ever--and it seems most people are struggling with the guilt of limited time, opportunity, and resources. The fields of the twenty-first century are seeded with myriad guilt, choking the good gardens of our progress as individuals and as a race. Guilt with a Twist is a kind of "gardener's guide" to pulling the weeds of "bad guilt" and bringing forth a healthier harvest.