Confession
Related: Christianity - crime - sin - guilt
Definition
In criminal proceedings, a confession is a document in which a suspect admits having committed a crime.
Confession of sins
Confession of sins is an integral part of the Christian faith and practice. The meaning is essentially the same as the criminal one - to admit one's own guilt. Confession of one's sins, or at least of one's sinfulness, is seen by most churches as a pre-requisite for becoming a Christian. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confession [Sept 2005]
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1770/1782) - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Mademoiselle Lambercier showed towards me a mother's affection and also a mother's authority, which she sometimes carried so far as to inflict on us the usual punishment of children when we had deserved it. ... I had found in the pain and even in the shame of it an element of sensuality which left more desire than fear of receiving the experience again from the same hand. It is true that, as in all this a precocious sexual element was doubtless mixed, the same chastisement if inflicted by her brother would not have seemed so pleasant... Who would have believed, that this childish punishment, received at the age of 8 from the hand of a young woman of 30, would have determined my tastes, my desires, my passions, for the rest of my life?
The foundational Romantic text was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. Rousseau began with the assertion that here, for the first time ever, was an autobiography that gave it all away, told it all. The killer ingredient, which sold the book for over two centuries on a whisper and a nod, was Rousseau's confession of sexual masochism and his recollection of the childhood spankings that provoked it. Aside from this, Confessions is 600 or so pages of dissimulation, self-contradiction, treachery, special pleading, innuendo, raving, revenge, and lies. But what gushes out is the overwhelming "presence" of Rousseau himself: the paranoiac, the plaintiff, the pervert. The scandalous incoherence of precisely this person, no better, after all, than he should be, behaving badly, just like us in fact: real, really here. --Fred Vermorel, October - November 2000, Village Voice Literary Supplement, Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography, [http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/170/vermorel.shtml]
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