Helen Block Lewis was born on Henry Street in Manhattan, New York City, in 1913.
Lewis died at age 73 due to cancer at her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home on January 18, 1987.
[3] Lewis was an experimental psychologist and an instructor at Brooklyn College until the late 1940s, upon realizing that she could not receive academic tenure due to her having once been a part of the Communist Party.
She was an educator at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health.
They learned that "the experience of guilt leads to a focus on specific behaviors" and is "less painful than shame" while being "remorse, regret, and tension without disrupting the unity of the self or impairing the self through global devaluation".
The "internal command of guilt" is to stop doing something for violating "a rule or standard" and to change the behavior.