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This article requires a more scientific treatment
Survivor guilt is a type of remorse felt by people who manage to survive a tragic event involving much loss of life, especially the lives of friends and loved ones or other people commonly associated with the survivor. Sufferers often feel guilty that they and their family get to move on with their lives, whereas other people and their families were not as lucky. It is commonly summed up by the phrase "I should have died with them" or even "I should have died instead of them".
The song "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables", from the cast recording of the Broadway production of Les Misérables, is a soliloquy in which Marius feels survivor guilt for being the only survivor of the barricade.
Historian Stephen Ambrose (1992) presents a case of how soldiers in World War II dealt with survivor guilt. When exposed to the deaths of their comrades in combat, soldiers felt a sense of immediate relief when surviving a battle, rationalising the feeling as "Lucky it wasn't me". However, over time they become guilty over their survival to the point where they deprecate their own actions to embellish the actions of the fallen.
References
- Ambrose, Stephen E., Band of Brothers (London: Pocket Books, 2001)