The Use and Satisfaction of Blame

The choice to live our lives fully and meaningfully comes with responsibility, which can sometimes feel emotionally overwhelming or even threatening. In clinical work, the tendency to locate responsibility outside of oneself—through blame—can function as a powerful psychological defense against change.

Blame can serve as a way of avoiding emotional responsibility and maintaining a sense of certainty about oneself and others. While this may provide temporary relief, it can also become a significant impediment to therapeutic change and psychological development.

As Erica Jong writes:

“No one to blame!... That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated… How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

Blame as a Psychological Defense

From a psychoanalytic perspective, blame is not simply an attitude but a defensive structure that helps regulate anxiety, guilt, and internal conflict.

By locating the source of distress externally, the individual avoids contact with more complex internal realities—such as ambivalence, dependency, loss, or responsibility.

Blame and Resistance to Psychological Change

In therapy, entrenched patterns of blame often emerge at moments where change becomes possible. Responsibility for one’s emotional life can feel destabilizing, even when it is also the condition for growth.

Letting go of blame does not imply self-reproach. Rather, it involves moving toward a more integrated understanding of one’s role in recurring emotional and relational patterns.

Clinical Implications

Working through blame requires more than insight alone. It involves tolerating discomfort, relinquishing defensive certainty, and gradually developing the capacity to hold emotional complexity without immediate externalization.

In depth-oriented psychotherapy, this shift often marks a transition from repetition of old patterns toward genuine psychological change.

Located at 40 West 13th Street near Union Square, I offer in-person psychotherapy in Manhattan as well as secure telehealth sessions across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.