Blame occupies a remarkably diverse terrain within the depth-psychology and classical studies corpus. At the archaic Greek stratum — represented most fully by Nagy, Adkins, Williams, and Detienne — blame functions as a formal social and poetic institution: the binary counterpart to praise, an instrument of communal evaluation whose vehicles include epic neikos, iambic invective, and ritual reproach. Here blame is not primarily a psychological event but a constitutive act of social ordering, assigning responsibility, marking deviation, and enforcing the standards of arete. Williams presses beyond this formal dimension to examine how blame attaches to the four elements of responsibility — cause, intention, state, and response — demonstrating that no single conception of responsibility can govern all contexts, and that ancient Greek usage already anticipates the contested modern problem of moral luck. Adkins traces how Homeric ‘pollution’ displaces blame onto a scapegoat figure, revealing the non-rational, communal dimensions of causal attribution. In contemporary clinical registers, Miller’s motivational interviewing explicitly brackets blame as therapeutically obstructive, proposing a ‘no-fault’ counseling frame in which the assignment of fault is rendered irrelevant so that genuine change may proceed. Pargament identifies ‘religious scapegoating’ as a pathological variant wherein ill persons are made to bear disproportionate blame through theologically reinforced stigma. Across all registers, blame emerges as the hinge between causation and moral evaluation — contested, culturally variable, and never psychologically neutral.
Counseling has a no-fault policy. I’m not interested in looking for who’s to blame, but rather what’s troubling you, and what you might be able to do about it.
Miller argues that rendering blame therapeutically irrelevant — substituting a ‘no-fault’ framework — removes a major defensive obstacle to genuine engagement in counseling.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013thesis
There is not, and there never could be, just one appropriate way of adjusting these elements to one another — as we might put it, just one correct conception of responsibility.
Williams argues that blame and responsibility are always constructed from variable combinations of cause, intention, state, and response, making any single normative account philosophically untenable.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis
He may also, in one way or another, have to make up for his mistake. In just these senses, he is to blame.
Williams demonstrates, through the Homeric figure of Telemachus, that ancient Greek blame encompasses both causal attribution and the normative demand for reparative response.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis
the subject of blame is base, and so too are the words that describe him, but the blamer himself can remain noble. Such a situation cannot be accommodated by Aristotle’s scheme of blame poetry.
Nagy challenges Aristotle’s formulation by showing that in epic tradition the moral valence of blame attaches to its object, not its author, permitting noble figures to employ base language.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
in a society which does not distinguish between moral error and mistake, it is impossible to distinguish mockery, abuse, and rebuke. There is only one situation: unpleasant words directed at a man who has in fact fallen short of the expectations of society.
Nagy, citing Adkins, argues that archaic Greek blame is a unitary social sanction collapsing distinctions between moral condemnation and practical reproach.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis
In an agonistic society, which so highly valued a warrior’s excellence, no domain was subjected more to praise or blame than military feats. In this domain, the poet was the supreme arbiter.
Detienne establishes that in archaic Sparta, blame and praise constituted the primary regulatory mechanism of social hierarchy, with the poet wielding sovereign adjudicating authority.
, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996supporting
the language of praise poetry presents the language of unjustified blame as parallel to the eating of heroes’ corpses by dogs.
Nagy reveals how praise poetry frames unwarranted blame as a form of desecration, mapping the moral pollution of unjust reproach onto the imagery of ritual defilement.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
Thersites is the most inimical figure to the two prime characters of Homeric Epos precisely because it is his function to blame them.
Nagy reads Thersites as the institutional embodiment of blame poetry within epic, whose enmity toward Achilles and Odysseus is structurally determined by his role as blamer.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
Already burdened by illness, the person with AIDS is asked to bear the brunt of the blame for his or her condition. This is not to say that the individual is not responsible for choices.
Pargament identifies religious scapegoating as a pathological amplification of blame, in which theological framing forecloses alternative causal interpretations and compounds suffering.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
given defeat, civil strife, famine or pestilence, their anger, despair, and bewilderment will discharge upon him with such force as to endow him, in thei
Adkins demonstrates how communal distress seeks a ‘polluted’ individual as a discharge point for collective blame, revealing the non-rational, scapegoating logic underlying early Greek responsibility.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Martha Nussbaum, having correctly presented the arguments about conflict, goes on to introduce into her reading the suggestion that the Chorus blames Agamemnon, and Aeschylus intends us to blame him, for the murderous fury with which he carried out the killing.
Williams critically examines Nussbaum’s moralistic reading of Agamemnon to argue that textual evidence does not support the attribution of blameworthy intent where tragic necessity is operative.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
when areté is in question, results are so important that intentions are not considered at all.
Adkins establishes that Homeric blame operates on a results-based rather than intention-based standard, making outcomes rather than motives the primary criterion of culpability.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
the explanation of a runner’s being hit must lie with the runner, not with
Williams traces an Antiphontic legal argument showing that ancient Greek blame could be redirected from agent to victim when causal analysis demanded it, complicating simple attribution.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
Agamemnon cannot forget the blindness (or the goddess) by which he was first blinded. That is to say, it is blindness, ate, to dishonour the man who is aristos.
Adkins shows how ate functions in Homer as a mechanism that deflects personal blame onto divine compulsion while preserving the social demand for accountability.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
To plead ate cannot be an attempt to evade responsibility for one’s actions, but he goes on, In this sense, responsibility is not moral, but cannot be avoided.
Williams engages Adkins’s claim that Homeric invocations of ate do not constitute moral evasion but rather reveal that the Greeks operated with a non-moral conception of unavoidable responsibility.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
the noun enēpā ‘blame, reproach’ and the corresponding verb enenēpe ‘blamed, reproached [aorist]’
Nagy’s lexical analysis of Homeric blame terminology illustrates the close connection between reproach as speech act and grief as its psychological consequence in the epic tradition.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
We live life from the viewpoint of victims, and we are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.
The ACA framework implicitly treats self-blame and victim identification as intertwined characterological consequences of childhood dysfunction, though blame is not the text’s explicit focus.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012aside
The curse is working, in the house, in the blood, in the mind, as the successive generations appear, driving them — irresistibly? — on to evil and destruction.
Adkins examines the inherited curse as a device that diffuses blame across generations, rendering individual moral accountability ambiguous under conditions of compelled transgression.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960aside
he could not admit it in himself, seeing only its projected form as Jew, Slav, intellectual, foreign, weak, and sick.
Hillman treats Hitler’s radical projection as a case where blame is entirely externalized through shadow-denial, eliminating internal moral accountability and enabling genocidal violence.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside