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Whose Shame is it Anyway?Donna M. Orange Ph.D., Psy.D.Published online: 23 Oct 2013.
To cite this article: Donna M. Orange Ph.D., Psy.D. (2008) Whose Shame is it Anyway?,Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 44:1, 83-100, DOI: 10.1080/00107530.2008.10745952
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SYMPOSIUM ON SHAME
DONNA M. ORANGE, Ph.D., Psy.D.
WHOSE SHAME Is IT ANYwAY?llFEWORLDS OF HUMIliATION AND SYSTEMS OF RESTORATION
(OR "THE ANALYST'S SHAME")
Abstract: Shame in the analytic system belongs neither to the patient nor to the analyst but is intersubjectively generated, maintained, exacerbated, and, we hope,mitigated, within the relational system. This shame arises partly from the treatmentsituation itself, but also from the lifeworlds of shame that each partner brings tothe encounter. These lifeworlds variably emerge from humiliation processes orshame-and-blame systems in families, religions, cultures, and psychoanalytic institutes. Both shame awareness and an attitude of radical acceptance or profoundrecognition can help analysts to create a climate where self-respect can grow.
Keywords: shame, humiliation, intersubjective, emotion, vulnerable, blame, system
See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip ofscorn, the mockery of that living £rye, the pointed finger, touching the soreplace in your heart!
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
Even if I be likened to a rat I do not care, prouided that particular rat bewanted by you, and be ofuse in the world, and be retained in itsposition,and receive its reward.
-Dostoyevsky
I T MAY SEEM UNNECESSARY to define shame, 35 years after HelenBlock Lewis and Heinz Kohut, both writing in 1971, brought it center
stage in psychoanalytic theory and practice and showed us how insidiously and unconsciously shame infects our lives. Still, some attempts atdefinition have enriched our understanding sufficiently to justify review.
The pioneers in the study of shame-Leon Wurmser in the classicaltradition, Francis Broucek from developmental and emotion studies, and,
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 44, No. 1. ISSN 0010-7530© 2008 William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY. All rights reserved,
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84 DONNA M. ORANGE, Ph.D., Psy.D.
especially, Andrew Morrison in self psychology-have sensitized us toshame's pervasiveness in human life and to its disastrous effects, from underachievement, depression, self-hatred, and suicide in individual lives towar, rape, and torture in societal contexts. They have studied its originsand its many manifestations. Morrison, directly and indirectly the teacherof so many of us, in particular has shown how integral shame is to theforms of narcissism studied by Kohut and by other self psychologists, andhow much the understanding of shame can contribute to the treatment ofthe afflicted ones. In 1984 Morrison defined shame as "an affect reflectinga sense of failure or deficit of the self" (p, 502).
Lansky's (999) somewhat more relational definition includes his veryuseful distinction between shame and guilt:
Shame is about the self. The word as we now understand it refers, not simply to one type of affect, but to a complex emotional system regulating thesocial bond, that is signaling disturbance to the status of the self within thesocial order: what is one is before oneself and others; one's standing, importance, or lack of it: one's lovability, sense of acceptability, or imminentrejection, as seen before the eye of the other or the internal self-evaluativeeye of the self. This essential relationship to the self is in contrast to the domain of guilt, which does not concern the self-what one is-so much as itdoes what one does-real or fantasied actions, transgressions, or omissionsthat harm the other lp. 347].
Ikonen, Rechardt, and Rechardt (993) similarly see shame as intrinsicallyintersubjective experience: "shame is a reaction to the absence of approving reciprocity" (p. 100).
Lansky (1999) further describes the range or spectrum of shame that
arises ... from a vast array of psychopathological dispositions and humanexperience that involve awareness of failure to meet standards and ideals,from exposure as inadequate or deficient; from fantasied or actual denied orinferior status; and from awareness of oneself as dirty, inadequate, needy,empty, dependent, rageful, disappointing, shy, socially fearful or inept, humiliation prone, and the like. The spectrum of shame-related emotions andemotional situations, includes, in addition to shame itself, embarrassment,humiliation (the experience of shame as deliberately inflicted by another),inferiority, withdrawal, shyness, and social fearfulness; it also includes defenses against shame (pudeur), that is, the obverse of "shameless": modesty,humility, and related concepts. Shame can be seen as latently operative
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WHOSE SHAME IS IT ANYWAY?
behind other affective phenomena: vengefulness, envy, resentment, andother forms of rage, all of which are found regularly to be instigated by andexperience of shame or shame-producing self-conscious comparison thatremains bypassed or unacknowledged. Shame is also an invariable accompaniment of all exposure or threatened exposure of interruptions of personality cohesion, of fragmented, dissociated, and disorganized and panickystates lpp. 351-3521.
85
The pervasiveness and relationality of shame in all these permutations become more and more unavoidable.
Whose Shame?
My main thesis, is that shame in the analytic system belongs neither to thepatient nor to the analyst, but is intersubjectively generated, maintained,exacerbated, and, we hope, mitigated within the relational system. Noone is born ashamed, but we can surely inhabit together experientialworlds of what an anonymous American writer of the 1930s Great Depression called "that ratty gnawing shame."
Morrison (984) has taught us that an analyst must be ready to noticeboth shame and shame-anxiety:
[Rjecognition and acceptance of the patient's shame lies at the heart of empathic listening in the analytic process.... it must also be remembered thatshame itself, as well as the material that causes it, will frequently be hiddenand withdrawn from the analyst, particularly by the patient with narcissisticpathology. It must be sought actively and with patience by the respectfulanalyst-selfobject, "teased out," particularly from the narcissistic rage of thevulnerable, self-impaired individual lp. SOl].
We owe to Morrison in particular a deeper understanding of what Kohuttaught us to recognize as narcissistic rage: that rage and violence are mostoften, if not always, the visible face of unbearable shame, or loss of face.
The study of shame, however, has often been embedded in assumptionsthat many of us no longer share: first, that emotions are really physicalsomethings called "affects" (Malin, 1999), a term that lends itself, in myview, to reification and to neuroistic (Brothers, 2001) reductionism. Second,these "affects" are considered single, atomistic mental states characterizedby recognizable physiological manifestations. They are, third, most often
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thought to belong primarily or exclusively to those single individuals thatmy collaborators and I have called isolated minds. For affect theorist Sylvan Tomkins (1962-1963), for example, shame was defined as a slumpingposture with drooping head and looking aside, seen quite early in infancy. He thought it was a hardwired response to interest interruptionsand that it was independent of relational experience. "Shame is inevitablefor any human being insofar as desire outruns fulfillment sufficiently to attenuate interest without destroying it" (p. 185). Michael Lewis (992), incontrast, views shame as a later development, dependent on the child'sdevelopment of conscious self-awareness and a sense of being viewed.Shame, he believes, requires a sense of success and failure in regard tostandards and rules and is equivalent to a global sense of failure. Fromneither theorist do we find much reference to the person's experience orto the relational context.
Others, however, have begun to study emotional life differently. Lichtenberg, whose motivational systems theory (Lichtenberg, Lachmann, andFosshage, 1992, 1996, 2002) can be seen as an attempt to map the generalcontours of a person's emotional life, comments with respect to Tomkins's0962-1963) account of shame-also adopted by Broucek (991)-that heprefers "a theory that regards the baby during the first year as having aspectrum of aversive affects, one of which is an experience that lies in continuity with what is later more easily categorized as shame" (Lichtenberg,1994, pp. 126-127). This approach, although it retains the affect idea, ismore relational-aversive implies turning from something or someoneand is also far more systemic and less concrete.
Recently, however, theorists inspired by systems, chaos, and complexitytheories (Sander, 1982; Fogel, 1993; Beebe and Lachmann, 2002; Stolorow,Atwood, and Orange, 2002) have pointed the way to an even more radicalrethinking of shame in psychoanalysis. Although there are important differences among these theorists, their first important move, to my way ofthinking, has been to question and rethink the sharp distinctions usuallyassumed between cognition and affect, or, as I would prefer to say, between thought and emotional life. (I prefer these terms not because theyare informal, but because they sound less substantive and more processoriented.) Even more important, these theorists regard emotion as anemergent property of relational systems, as the total embodied involvement and participation in such intersubjective fields. Sander (982), for example, taught us to regard "the infant, the caregiver, and the exchangesbetween them as constituting a biological system" (p. 316), including every
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WHOSE SHAME IS IT ANYWAY? 87
aspect of development. Fogel (993), making the shift from affect to emotion, sees emotion as one form of embodied cognition/participation in organic systems or cultures. Beebe and Lachmann (2002) have drawn ourattention to the fine points of self- and mutual regulation, showing us howemotional participation in dialogic systems works in detail. Our own work(Stolorow et al., 2002) has steadfastly refused the cognition-emotion dichotomy and claimed that psychoanalytic understanding of experientialworlds-yours, mine, and ours--constitutes decisive evidence against thisdualism. Although shame often involves experiences of isolation, I believeshame, like all emotion, is an emergent property of a relational system.
Even in the experiential worlds of shame, which feel so aversive, isolating, and "sticky" (Morrison, 1999), we are intricately involved in intersubjective systems. By an intersubjective system I mean "any psychologicalfield formed by interacting worlds of experience, at whatever developmental level these may be organized" (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). In anintersubjective shame system, we feel we are deficient by comparison withthe others (envy); we feel we are failures in our own and others' eyes; wefeel so held up to critical scrutiny in our desperate misery that we want tosink into the ground and become invisible. From our wretched hell, wefeel like the shades being stared at by Dante, who is reproached by AlessioInterminei: "Why are you so greedy to look at me when all of these are justas filthy?" (Alighieri, 1994). Later Virgil asks him, "What are you staring at?Why let your vision linger there down among the disconsolate and mutilated shades?" (Canto XXIX). Dante in turn is ashamed before Virgil, whohas seen his "drunken eyes."!
Philosophers, too, have taken an interest in shame, especially notingthat it seems to have useful functions in human life as well as the disastrous ones I have alluded to. It is no compliment to call someone "shameless." Martha Nussbaum (2004), drawing particularly on the work ofWinnicott for her developmental ideas, argues that shame originates fromthe awareness of one's vulnerabilities in the presence of others. Althoughthe capacity to feel shame may have important social benefits, she thinksthat the harm generated by shaming makes it immoral to use it for punishment. Anxiety about shame, she believes, creates societal systems thatvalue strength over vulnerability, encouraging men especially to embracea rigid self-ideal of independence and invulnerability.
1 It may be of interest that shame is so often associated with the eyes and that self-respectoften seems so visible.
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British moral philosopher Bernard Williams (1993) has captured much
of the phenomenological experience of shame, and of its relational
embeddedness:
Illn the experience of shame, one's whole being seems diminished or lessened. In my experience of shame, the other sees all of me and all throughme, even if the occasion of shame is on my surface-for instance, in my appearance; and the expression of shame, in general, as well as in the particular form of it that is embarrassment, is not just the desire to hide, or to hidemy face, but the desire to disappear, not to be there. It is not even the wish,as people say, to sink through the floor, but rather the wish that the spaceoccupied by me should be instantaneously empty lp, 891.
Consider the situation, for example, of a woman whose husband or ro
mantic partner has continued his attachment to his previous partner but is
ashamed to say so. To guard the bond between them, she needs to believe his claims that the previous relationship is finished and that she can
finally keep him and get him to love her as she desperately needs to beloved. They live within a world of shame. When the evidence confounds
her, she becomes full of preoccupation with suicide. We can understand
her suicidal inclination as her rage both against herself for having been
duped and against him for using her, but also, as Williams says, as a desire
that the relational space occupied by her should be empty. She cannot
bear that anyone should even look at her, she feels so degraded. And, unfortunately, her fear of this same feeling is what kept her from looking
clearly at her situation in the first place.
Or consider this story from The New York Times about Qingming, a Chinese peasant from an abjectly poor family:
He wanted to attend college. But to do so meant taking the annual collegeentrance examination. On the humid morning of June 4, three days beforethe exam, Qingming's teacher repeated a common refrain: he had to pay hislast $80 in fees or he would not be allowed to take the test. Qingming stoodbefore his classmates, his shame overtaken by anger.
"I do not have the money," he said slowly, according to several teacherswho described the events that morning. But his teacher-and the systemwould not budge.
A few hours later, Qingming, 18 years old, stepped in front of an approaching locomotive [Kahn and Yardley, 2004, pp. 1,61.
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WHOSE SHAME IS IT ANYWAY? 89
Here we can see that shame is neither affect nor cognition. Nor does it belong primarily or exclusively to Qingming. Rather, an emergent shameprocess pervaded an entire experiential world. Qingming's shame-riddenworld included his family, his school, his changing and traditional culture,his hopes and possibilities, his rage and despair. As Williams suggests, hecould no longer inhabit this world of rage and shame or allow it to inhabithim. Absent a compassionate Witness, the shame system destroyed him.
That example leads us to the relationship between humiliation andshame, sometimes described as two different affects. Some instead seehumiliation as a form of shame. In Morrison's (984) words, "Humiliationrepresents the strong experience of shame reflecting severe externalshaming or shame anxiety at the hands of a highly cathected object ("asignificant other") (p. 487). My preference would be to regard humiliationas the intersubjective process most often involved in creating experientialworlds of shame. There are, of course, many forms of humiliation, ranging from early shaming parent-ehild interactions, through bullying, torape and torture. Each of these establishes a shaming system, in which thedominator tries to overcome shame, "the underside of narcissism" (Morrison, 1989), by humiliating the other, that is, by shaming him. Some havespeculated that empathy is possible because we are prewired to (I wouldsay we have the capacity to) experience both sides of interactions. Thiscould mean that we are born prepared to participate in relational systems,including those organized primarily around shame.
Another aspect of shame that makes it worth considering as a systemsconcept rather than as an affect in a person is its pervasive quality. InMorrison's (1994) evocative words, "lSlhame settles in like a dense fog,obscuring everything else, imposing only its own shapeless, substanceless impression. It becomes impossible to establish bearings or to orientoneself in relation to the broader landscape" (p. 19). Like an invasiveweed or a computer virus, it insinuates itself into our entire lives, ourwhole experiential worlds, and to spoil everything. I did not simply failto complete the marathon; rather, I am a failure. I did not just inadvertently retraumatize my patient; I am a failure as an analyst and thus as ahuman being. I did not only complain about my sore feet; I am simply aselfish person. This pervasive quality of shame, of course, suggests itsorigins in the family, where my experiential world became organizedaround a sense of myself as worthless, good for nothing, and selfish.Worst of all, there is no hope of escape from the enclosure of this world
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except through the encounter with another with whom I must againenter worlds of shame.
Returning to our main theme, I suggest that "the analyst's shame" is amisnomer. Lynne Jacobs (1996) reminds us that the analytic situation isshaming for many reasons: 1) The patient usually needs the analyst morethan the analyst needs the patient. 2) Approaching an analyst means something is wrong with the patient right off. 3) For therapists, there is the riskof humiliating failure at a profession that means everything to us. 4) Bothanalyst and patient risk exposure of painful vulnerabilities and personalshortcomings that may be felt as the shameful sense of being bad, disgusting, or a complete failure as a human being. 5) Emotional life itself, with itspainful, wounding fears and hopes, is often a context of shame, althoughthis depends on the cultures of family and larger contexts. 6) Worst of all,traditional therapies, including psychoanalysis, have made the analyst!therapist into an expert authority. The claim to know the patient betterthan the patient knows himself creates a culture of shame. SimilarlyIkonenet al. (993) have noted that "the mere admission of the need for help maybe unbearably humiliating" (p. 120) and that even if the analysis is helpful,"Nietzsche's cynical comment on gratitude (that gratitude is a milder formof revenge) concerns the humiliation and shame in connection with receiving help" (p. 121). Although relational psychoanalysis, including selfpsychology and intersubjective systems theory, has sought in importantways to minimize and mitigate these shaming aspects of the analytic situation, there is no avoiding them completely.
The analytic setup, of course, is only part of the problem of shame.The analytic culture of shame in a particular treatment emerges from theinterplay of the personal worlds of experience of both participants. Whatever I, as patient or analyst, bring into the analytic field, is until then onlypotential, nothing actual. It may be that my history has prepared me toanticipate or to cocreate particular forms of humiliation, but it is not inevitable that I will find them with you. If what I bring to the treatment ismine willy-nilly, then why do patients have such different experienceswith different analysts, and why do analysts have such varied experiencesin a single day of clinical work? In my view, a dialogical self (Taylor,1991) exists only within relationships and cultures, implicit and explicit,and only within these does "my shame" exist. There is no such thing asan infant, there is no such thing as a patient (as I have said elsewhere;Orange, 2002), and there is no such thing as the patient's or the analyst'sshame.
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WHOSE SHAME IS IT ANYWAY?
Clinical Stories
91
Borrowed from Lynne Jacobs (1996)
"David was intense and easily injured. He was coming to see me for aperiod of three months while his therapist took a maternity leave. In ourfirst meeting, he asked if we could arrange a regular weekly session time.He said it would help to anchor him during this difficult time. He was feeling bereft and abandoned by his therapist and frightened that the therapist's new baby portended a loss of his place in the therapist'S heart andmind. As our discussion unfolded, I told him that, although there wouldbe occasional exceptions, we could meet regularly on Friday mornings.
"A few weeks later, I told him, in a rather matter-of-fact tone, that Iwould have to reschedule three of our subsequent sessions. In our nextsession, he expressed hurt and righteous anger at my casual attitude. Hesaid it meant to him that I did not take our interim work seriously, that Iwas just biding my time with him. I was surprised by the intensity of hisreaction. I felt a flash of reciprocal righteous anger and said to myself,How dare he attack me! I have gone out of my way to accommodate him;surely he must know it was not easy to carve out a regular time on suchshort notice!
"My angry reaction was defensive. I had experienced his righteousness asshaming to me, and I wished to defend myself against my rising shame byshaming him for shaming me! I also recognized that I had presumed that hewas aware of the demands he had made on my schedule. I had simply beenso absorbed in my own perspective that I had not noticed that his vantagepoint was quite different from mine. In the course of our explorations, hedescribed how he had never had any impact on his parents and how theytreated him. They were dismissive of his aims and desires. I asked him howI had dismissed him. He said I ignored his need to plan and his feelingsabout needing an anchor and needing me to see our work as important. Hesaid he felt as though he was just a flat line, someone I did not need to contend with. I told him, appreciatively, that he had now brought himself to meas someone to contend with. I also said I had been insensitive to his needsand had been preoccupied with my own. He was excited and relieved thatwe could work/fight this problem out between us" (pp. 4-5, in typescript).
Comment: Here we see first the asymmetry of the preexisting frame ofthe patient seeking help from the apparently less vulnerable therapist. Bothbegin innocently and with the best of intentions. Before long they are tied
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up together in an impasse that results from mutual shaming. The shame belongs neither to David nor to Lynne; it becomes like the oxygen in the roomwhen they are together, all-pervasive. It is as if each has set off an allergicreaction in the other, and the reactions themselves generate more and moredifficulty. Each retreats within this world of shame into the memorializedhumiliations of lifetimes. For David, as Jacobs tells us, "someone else's limits were intensely shaming to him. He took them as a personal rejection ofhim because he was not worthy of more serious consideration." For Lynne,apparently, being accused of a selfish refusal to consider the needs of theother may have evoked a shameful sense about having any needs of herown. The working through of this impasse required courage from both theshame generators and the shamed and began, as it often must, with thetherapist's acknowledging her participation in the mess-making.
My Patient Ted
Ted, a professor at Columbia University who had also attended there asan undergraduate and graduate student, came to me depressed and anxious about finishing the book he needed to have published before histenure review. He knew he had the ability, and the most eminent scholarsin his field respected and supported him, but he was stuck, never feelingthat he had read enough, or "covered all the bases." He knew of my academic background and, having heard that I had finished a book, hoped Imight be able to help him. He was also very much concerned that he hadnot been able to marry and establish a family. He apparently always chosethe wrong partners, and feared that something might be irredeemablywrong with him.
We worked for several years, during which he concluded that he wasstuck because he really did not want to be a professor but had beenblindly following others' agenda for him. He found his way into anotherline of work that suited him very well. In addition, after years of work onhis family's multiple forms of invalidation and shaming, he was able tofind a partner and settle down.
Along the way, however, perhaps two years into a twice-weekly treatment, Ted began one day: "I've been thinking, and I'm trying to figure outwhy you hate Columbia. Yes, the university has hurt me, and yes, it hasgiven me everything that my family couldn't give and didn't want me tohave. But you are so supportive and encouraging to me, and yet thereis this thing about Columbia. I've felt we're getting nowhere for sometime now, and I wonder if it has something to do with this." Considerably
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WHOSE SHAME IS IT ANYWAY? 93
surprised, and playing for time to respond, I asked him to tell me more. It
seemed I had responded much more strongly to his complaints about theuniversity than to his satisfaction with it and had done so for the wholelength of the treatment.
I took a deep breath and told him that I wasn't sure, but that I guessedthat I had nothing against Columbia. I had, though, grown up in a worldwhere no one seemed to have heard of the Ivy League, and no one hadever felt I was capable or worthy of a first-rate education. Now my colleagues and patients included many people with undergraduate degreesand doctorates from these first-rate places, as well as from Oxford andCambridge. Often these people asked me where I had gone to college,and I had to answer, You will never have heard of it. And I was neverwrong about this but always painfully ashamed. I told him I was reallysorry that my envy and shame had been hurting and confusing him. Heseemed greatly relieved, telling me that he had felt that my reactions hadbeen confirming his sense that something was terribly wrong with him forworking in a terrible institution like Columbia University. We were soonvery much back on track, and this became one of our shared jokes.
Comment: Again, this could seem to be an everyday, garden-variety storyof the analyst's envious shame. But let us look again. Yes, I bring to every interaction of my life an experiential world structured by my mother's shamingepithets: worthless, good for nothing, selfish, as well as by my father'scontempt and humiliating violence. I bring with me the potential to feel either mildly or desperately inadequate, like Pigpen's cloud of dust that precedes his arrival. But, no, I don't hate Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia,Oxford, or Cambridge, and they come into the foreground of my dialogicself-awareness only in specific relational contexts. The contexts themselvesmayor may not be shame makers-it depends. SimilarlyI find that patientswho grew up with trust funds-often ashamed themselves of their privileged lives in relation to me-s-can evoke shame between us that does notseem to have preexisted the encounter. My experiences with such patients,and theirs with me, have been so varied that I cannot help thinking of shameas a quality of a particular emotional world in which we both participate.
But it can get much worse, and treatment can actually fail. The threetreatments in my years as a psychoanalyst that ended badly, from mypoint of view, all involved people who attacked me relentlessly in themost contemptuous tone and by whom I felt unbearably humiliated. Iwas, they alleged, too caring and empathic, too self-psychological, toopoorly read, too badly educated, too lower class, too accommodating, too
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informal, too afraid of aggression. I was not rich, cultured, intelligent,confrontational, or connected to the right people. I was easily hurt, toovulnerable, of ambiguous sexual orientation, unreliable, dishonest, willing to do anything to curry favor with the powerful, and I had no sense ofstyle. This is the short list, drawn from all three treatments. If these accusations seem randomly strung together, they are because they felt soto me. Shame-ridden patients who have, for different reasons in eachinstance, humiliated me in this way so reminiscent of my early life andconvent years (Armstrong, 1994), have been paralyzing for me. I feelenormous shame and sorrow to this day about those treatments, whichfoundered on the icebergs of shame.
On a slightly more optimistic note, I must say that the third of these impasse-treatments actually reached some resolution and understanding. Ithink perhaps my increasing sense of having become a respected memberof the psychoanalytic community, and my awareness that my other clinical work was going reasonably well, gave me some confidence. I was finally able to say, Enough. Unless we can speak respectfully to each other,I can no longer work with you. The patient, who said he had needed justthis sort of limit-setting, calmed down for several months, until some inadequacy of mine met some vulnerability of his (or we mutually createdthese, perhaps), and the cycle repeated until I remembered once againthat I am not a punching bag.
Of course, not all such situations, or their resolutions, are the same. Relational theorists have introduced to us many ways of understanding similar clinical problems, and of participating in their resolution. Still, formany of us professional helpers, rageful or coldly contemptuous tiradescan disorganize us severely, depending on our own lifeworlds of shame.We may be tempted to retreat or defend by calling the patient a borderline(Jaenicke, 2003) or a character disorder. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, systems thinking deprives us of this defense, leaving us painfullyaware of our own participation in the problematic interaction. Findingsupport through supervision or consultation may restore our sense of selfpossession enough to allow us to work differently with the patient or torefer the patient with less residual shame than I have had to bear.
Contexts of Shame
Several thoughts occur to me about the systemic character of shame in thepsychoanalytic dialogue. First, shame and blame go together. We can see
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this on the societal level. After 9/11, for example, many Americans, feelingterrified, shocked, and humiliated, sought to affix blame and thus welcomedthe division of the world into good and evil. We were too ashamed to seekunderstanding but sought instead to restore pride by means of revenge.Similarly, many have noted that the painful humiliations suffered after WorldWar I prepared Germans to blame their own shameful weakness and to embrace the first leader who promised them pride and self-confidence.
Likewise in treatment, when a shame system emerges, we look for someone to blame. The villains may be parents, bosses, peers who cheat toget ahead. The assumption, organizing principle, emotional convictionwhat Gadamer called "the binding expectation" (cited in Grondin andWeinsheimer 2003, p. 417/n44)--that someone must be to blame, can paralyze the treatment and destroy the search for understanding. Or thisbinding expectation can, depending on the culture of the family, shut conversation down out of fear of further exposing and shaming those to whomone is attached.
How can we escape the cycle of shame and blame? One suggestioncomes, not surprisingly, from Lymne]acobs (996), who borrows the concept of permission from gestalt therapist Arnold Beisser (970).
That permission is the permission to be themselves. I think that patients areconstantly assessing our interventions for whether or not we offer permission to have the feelings, aims, and needs which they have. They note ourposture, tone of voice, choice of words. And when they do not find permission, they often assume that their feelings, aims, and need are "beyond thepale." This means they do not belong in human company anymore. This is afundamental shame self-statement: I am not fit for human belonging....
[Creating permission] ... requires of the therapist that she tolerate her ownshame throughout sessions stretching over long periods of time. Most, if notall, patients are shaming of the therapist at certain times in the course of along term therapy ... if a therapist can relate in a relatively non-defensivemanner, be alert to her shaming impact--even the most inadvertent shamingimpact-and consistently work to acknowledge her defensiveness when it ishaving an impact on the patient, then a transformative process can be set intomotion [pp. 312-313].
Working with the patient to establish a climate of emotional permissioncreates a conversation in which one can become at home in one's own
2 I think there is a difference between emotional permission and ethical permission.
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emotional life and learn to find one's way around in it. Feeling treated as awelcome guest rather than as a dangerous stranger begins to undo shame.Experiential worlds, I believe, are transformed only in an atmosphere ofradical acceptance, but this acceptance, though sought from the beginning, will for a long time seem impossible and will emerge only graduallyin a treatment where the shame-and-blame system can, in thousands oftiny ways, be disrupted. We go on being, but always a little bit differently.
One way that I sometimes try explicitly to create this permission-spaceis by saying to the patient: "I have no interest in finding someone to blamefor your pain and trouble (or for what is happening between us). What Icare about is that we understand together what has happened to causeyou (or us) such trouble. We're not prosecutors; we are involved in a therapeutic dialogue, a healing conversation. Blaming is not our project." Often this message helps but will need revisiting from time to time if thepatient grew up, as I did, in a shame-blame family system.
Probably the most subtle, but also ultimately most powerful, shamebuster is our relentless interest in the patient's experience. We thereby tellour patients, without ever saying so, that they are profoundly worthy ofthe respectful regard of the other. Being you is not a shame, no matterhow organized you have become around a sense of your own badness,inadequacy, or failure. By working to understand the complex roots andramifications, we inch-by-inch undo the tenacity of the shame-riddensense of self. Occasionally, this process may produce a moment of whatEisold (999) calls a "profound recognition": "an experience in which patient feels that some significant part of himself or herself, previously setaside, if not entirely dissociated, has been 'seen,' 'met' by the analyst insuch a way that he or she can again come to know and acknowledge it asimportant" (p. 110). I suspect that such experiences reorganize shame systems by calling into question the sense that the totality of one's being, the"who I am," is so bad that it must be hidden.
Often this work is both facilitated and impeded by the analyst's capacityor propensity for shame, often exacerbated in psychoanalytic training(see Buechler, this issue). Without my own lifeworld of shame, even ifthe particulars are very different, I could not grasp yours deeply enough.The analogues, the embodied memories, would not be available. But if, asoften seems to happen, analyst and patient create together a mutualshame-blame world, consultation may be needed.
Such impasses frequently impel us to develop our shame-system awareness. We begin to notice many levels of shame cultures, starting with the
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analytic pair, and including the analytic situation itself, the couple, andthe nuclear family, to religions, nations, and the global world. The family,for example, is usually where infant shame capacities become worlds ofshame. So-called corporal punishment, for example, embodies a communication not that a child has done something wrong for which repaymentis owed (guilt), but rather that the child isbad. The humiliation process becomes a world of shame carried in one's whole being, the HeideggerianBefindlichkeit, that is, the emotion that is an inhabited lifeworld (Gendlin,1978/79). It lasts a lifetime, much longer than the physical pain. Similarly,contemptuous criticism, cruelty, and exaggerated penalties (a five-year-oldlocked in a closet for two weeks for stealing 18 cents), generate the shameworld of a whole life.
Religions too have been powerful shame systems: confessing sins,witch burning, ritual baths that suggest that women's bodies are sourcesof defilement, genital mutilation. The scarlet letter (Hawthorne et al.,1988) and the stocks exemplify the public shaming endorsed by earlierProtestantism. There are endless examples, among which I can describeone from personal experience. In most Roman Catholic religious communities, there existed until some years after Vatican II 0962-1965) a ritualcalled "the chapter of faults." There were variants (Armstrong, 1981), butin the one I know and carry in embodied memory, each sister had tokneel in turn before the community, accuse herself of her failures ofthe past two weeks-"Mother, I accuse myself of having failed in custodyof the eyes by looking around in the refectory (dining room)"-andthen make a request: "Sisters, will you please have the charity to tell memy faults." (We informally called this practice "the charity ball," an ironicchallenge to the shaming ritual.) Then, one or more companions, often asmany as eight or ten, would rise and accuse the kneeling person of various infractions of the rules and customs. She next had to ask the superiorfor a penance, often public, to be performed as soon as possible (Armstrong, 1981). All this was intended to teach us humility (often confusedin this context with shame) and to reinforce the search for perfection.Absolute perfection, of course, belonged in this theology only to God,and therefore seeking God was equivalent to seeking perfection. Anyfailure in observance meant we were not trying hard enough and deserved public humiliation, of which there existed many additional formsas well. Only after Vatican II, when the theology changed, did many ofus refuse to accuse each other, and this particular ritual shaming began todie out.
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Why do I tell you this story? It represents many shame cultures and theirideologies. Psychoanalysis, too, has had its culture of shame-especiallyin training-humiliating application interviews, reporting analyses, devastatingly critical supervision (not all, of course), and coursework that instilled disapproval and contempt for deviations from the rules andcustoms and discouraged the development of flexible and personal stylesof working. But our psychoanalytic theology, we may be thankful, is alsobeginning to change.
In addition, shame pervades larger cultural systems and trickles downto all of us, providing many aspects of the world we inhabit as psychoanalysts. Here are some historical examples. In the shame culture of ancientGreece, shame functioned as a moral framework, that is, to promote andrestrict forms of behavior and ways of being. Sophocles' Ajax, as Lansky(996) has so movingly shown, feels that suicide is his only refuge fromshame after Achilles' armor had been awarded to Odysseus instead of tohim. His companion, Tecmessa, says of him: "He is freshly miserable. It isa painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourselfand no one else has made it" (p. 776). Likewise, Oedipus destroys himselfout of shame. Euripides' Medea, likewise and contrariwise, destroys herchildren in an attempt to undo the shame she feels within her world because of Jason's humiliating rejection.
In a shaming culture, mere association with those with whom one disagrees can call down shame. During the American civil war, after Lincoln's later-beloved Gettysburg address, TheChicago Times is said to havewritten: "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he readsthe silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to bepointed out to intelligent foreigners as President of the United States"(Sandburg, 1939). Here we can see the use of shame both as a social controller and an opinion maker, as well as the cultural context as both overtand implicit creator of humiliation. Not only Lincoln receives the writer'scontempt, but also any reader who disagrees.
Today, relational psychoanalyst Neil Altman (2005) tells us, Americanshave joined in a culture of shame/vulnerability denial:
Post-September 11 American bellicosity and arrogance ... has to do with arefusal to accept narcissistic vulnerability on the part of Euro-Americans.The American mythology around power and virtue make a sense of collective shame nearly unthinkable. Those of us who came to feel shame aboutbeing American during the Vietnam War, or more recently during the Iraq
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war, or while contemplating American brutality to African Americans or native Americans, often experienced a sense of depression and disillusionment, the loss of our "ideal America." But the alternative to this sense ofdisillusionment is a refusal to recognize our narcissistic vulnerability, whichin its most malignant form can lead to rationalizing acts of "narcissistic rage"as virtuous or praiseworthy [po 2].
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I suspect that American machismo, shared by both men and women, further embodies this culture of shame that finds vulnerability unbearable.
To conclude, let us return to the analyst and patient who may togetherfeel like failures, or objects of contempt or both to each other and in theirexperiential worlds. In shame-filled rage and despair, they reach for a moment of grace, a chance for acceptance as worthy members of the humancommunity. In the best situation, the analyst sees the patient as worthyand is allowed to feel both healer and healed. The patient, who has giventhis gift to the analyst, is also constituted or restored to dignity in this mutual acknowledgment.
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Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D. is Faculty and Supervising Analyst, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York; and Facultyand Training and Supervising Analyst, ISIPSe (Institute for Specializationin Self and Relational Psychoanalysis), Rome.
315 West86tb Street, 9£New York, NY [email protected]
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