I had an experience some years ago which taught me something about the ways in which people make a bad situation worse by blaming themselves. One January, I had to officiate at two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died "full of years," as the Bible would say: both yielded to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence calls on the two families on the same afternoon.
At the first home, the son of the deceased woman said to me, "If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It"s my fault that she died." At the second home, the son of the other deceased woman said, "If only I hadn"t insisted on my mother"s going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was more than she could take. It"s my fault that she"s dead."
When things don"t turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Priests know that any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course—keeping Mother at home, postponing the operation—would have turned out better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse?
There seem to be two elements involved in our readiness to feel guilt. The first is our pressing need to believe that the world makes sense, that there is a cause for every effect and a reason for everything that happens. That leads us to find patterns and connections both where they really exist and where they exist only in our minds.
The second element is the notion that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault. The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile myth of omnipotence. A baby comes to think that the world exists to meet his needs, and that he makes everything happen in it. He wakes up in the morning and summons the rest of the world to its tasks. He cries, and someone comes to attend to him. When he is hungry, people feed him, and when he is wet, people change him. Very often, we do not completely outgrow that infantile notion that our wishes cause things to happen.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。
根据题干信号词“People have been to made to believe since infancy”可回文定位到尾段第三句“The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile myth of omnipotence”(这种感觉的根源来自于我们的幼年时代。心理学家谈到我们幼儿期的一种万能神话)，“this feeling”指代的就是尾段首句和第二句“The second element is the notion that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault.”(另一个因素是，我们认为：我们自己是万事万物发生的原因，尤其是发生坏事情的时候。从相信万事皆有因，到把所有错归因于己，这种推理似乎很简单)。具体阐述了“this feeling”(这种感觉)，故尾段首句和第二句为题眼。