In Act V of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth scrubs at her hands, desperate to cleanse herself of imagined bloodstains. Her “infected mind,” her doctor concludes, is a result of the “unnatural deeds” that she has helped bring about—namely the murder of the king. “More needs she the divine than the physician,” he concludes—letting himself off the hook.
Coming CleanOn the merits of owning up.
Coming CleanOn the merits of owning up.
From ancient myth to modern psychology—and in much of the literature in between—the act of confession has been depicted as a moral and physical release. The burden of a guilty conscience, we are told, can be lightened by “coming clean,” liberating you from the torture of living deceitfully.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most famous work, Crime and Punishment, for example, the murderer Raskolnikov is punished with ferocious paranoia and physical illness as he attempts to conceal his misdeeds. “Thought tormented him,” Dostoevsky writes, and eventually Raskolnikov realizes: “I don’t want to go on living like this.” When he finally admits to his crime, in the last pages of the novel, the “punishment” portion of the story is over. The judicial penalty that follows—a spell in a Siberian penal colony—is described in an epilogue, and despite the barrenness of the setting, it is brighter in tone than the rest of the book, reflecting a change in the protagonist: By coming clean and accepting punishment, his torment has ended.
Dostoevsky’s characterization of the psychological strain of a guilty conscience is borne out by modern science. Unconfessed guilt is a classic example of cognitive dissonance, the state of tension that arises when you’re forced to hold conflicting beliefs or behaviors: You know that what you’ve done is wrong, but in public you must uphold an appearance of probity. Confession, as a 1992 study by psychologist Eric Stice found, relieves the effects of cognitive dissonance, easing the stress and anxiety.
The psychosomatic aspect of a guilty conscience is captured in a familiar metaphor: “plagued by guilt.”1 To “come clean,” it follows, is to be purified or purged. Both words come from the same Latin root, from which also derives the term “purgatory”—the state between heaven and hell, in medieval belief, in which one could repent one’s sins. In the 14th-century poem The Divine Comedy, Dante imagines himself in purgatory, where he admits his iniquities before being immersed in “the waters that make clean.” Purged of his sin, he can proceed to the ultimate destination of his metaphysical travelogue: Paradiso. It’s certainly preferable to Raskolnikov’s Siberian end point, but both epics tell the same story: Wrongdoing leads to mental and physical torment, and redemption is possible if one is willing to come clean.
