Guilt and Shame have been extensively studied and used as mechanisms for explaining many psychological phenomena. They are frequent and important human experiences and have been proposed as both adaptive and pathological in accordance to psychiatric disorders.

This presentation aims to review literature on guilt and shame experiences and in particular their relation to psychopathology.

The first part appraises the most noticeable connections brought about by cultural settings and theological, philosophical and psychological (expressly psychoanalytical) epistemologies while intending to isolate phenomenological properties of guilt and shame. The latter will be object of a second part where there is an exploration of the possibility for a phenomenological structure of guilt and shame and the search for singularity factors.

It will review studies using the phenomenological method to decompress both experiences and specifically analyze self-experience, interpersonal experience and the experience of time during such episodes.

All previous probing will help on reviewing the possibility of guilt and shame experiences as being involved in Psychiatry and in psychopathological phenomena (rather than being used as explanatory devices)

Guilt and shame have phenomenological similarities and singularities. As pure experiential phenomena they are still inescapable occurrences in specific psychiatric disorders while their absence also relates to other disorders.