Shame

The Underside of Narcissism

Andrew P. Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317771616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Morrison provides a critical history of analytic and psychiatric attempts to make sense of shame, beginning with Freud and culminating in Kohut's understanding of shame in terms of narcissistic phenomena. The clinical section of the book clarifies both the theoretical status and treatment implications of shame in relation to narcissistic personality disorder, neurosis and higher-level character pathology, and manic-depressive illness.

1
Introduction and Overview

We have all felt shame. We have all suffered feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, incompetence; known a sense of defect and flaw, of failure; been scorned by others-such feelings are among the most painful we can experience. We hide them from ourselves and from others. Yet, shame has, until very recently, been little explored in the psychoanalytic literature.

My own interest in studying shame began a few years ago with a patient of mine, a man of my own age who had suffered from several episodes of severe depression and mania. He had never fulfilled the promise of his early talents or reached the pinnacles of achievement expected by his parents. The son of two concert musicians, he was "supposed" to reach great artistic heights; instead, he had become a middle-level technocrat in a business concern. He had married, but his wife and two children had left him following a manic episode. During treatment he gradually uncovered deep feelings of shame, mortification, and humiliation at his failures to attain his (and his parents') goals or to form lasting and intimate human relationships. This sense of failure was pervasive and reflected profoundly narcissistic expectations and vulnerabilities. Yet because of the deep pain these feelings caused, it was difficult to ferret them out and examine them in psychotherapy. He hid his shame both from himself and from me, his therapist, behind a wall of lethargy and depression, with occasional outbursts of mania to express his defensive grandiosity. This patient, then, introduced me to the ravages of shame. It was no accident that I found him likable, that I readily identified with the issues of his age and gender, and with his artistic aspirations. The shame of patients interacts with that of their therapists, and it was through my own identification with his goals and pain-a recognition of elements of my own shame feelings-that I was able to understand to the importance of shame in his life experience. For this man, the experience of shame was embedded in his narcissistic vulnerability and manic-depressive illness. (For an exploration of the relationship of shame to narcissism and to manic-depressive illness, see chapter 11.)

My work with this patient alerted me to shame in other patients. And, indeed, I found it in most of the people I was treating-men and women, neurotic as well as psychotic and character- disordered. In fact, as Wurmser (1981) has pointed out, hardly an analytic or therapeutic session goes by without the appearance of some expression or manifestation of shame, humiliation, embarrassment, mortification, despair, or disgrace. These shame phenomena are sometimes openly and consciously experienced at the heart of human unhappiness but at other times are hidden from experience because they are so painful. As Levin (1971) has noted, shame frequently causes one to hide, to avoid interpersonal contact as a protection against rejection, and to conceal the affective experience from one's own awareness. As guilt invites confession and forgiveness (Thrane, 1979), shame generates concealment out of a fear of rendering the self unacceptable (Morrison, 1983). Throughout this book, I will be exploring manifestations of the tendency to hide, to protect the self from rejection-a social manifestation-and from self-loathing-an intrapsychic, internal one.

Yet, as obvious as these observations may seem, I have been struck by the surprise and novelty they elicit from most clinicians. In discussions or presentations on shame to various groups of therapists, I have noted a common response: they acknowledge the relevance of shame to their practices, but then they remark that "Somehow I never thought about it in that way" or "It hadn't occurred to me as an important focus." How can we account for this seemingly paradoxical situation, in which a clearly relevant and significant human experience is so frequently relegated to the psychological "back burner" in clinical practice?

First, we must consider why shame for so long has been paid so little attention in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic literature. As the clinical vignette described earlier showed, shame is a central affective experience of narcissism (Broucek, 1982, Kinston, 1983; Morrison, 1983). In On Narcissism, Freud (1914) introduced the concepts of the ego ideal and self-regard, both of which are central to my perspective on shame. Freud described the ego ideal as that intrapsychic agent (later to be associated with the superego) which contains values and ideals. Had he gone further with this concept, Freud might well have proceeded to an investigation of shame and its relationship to conflicts and failures in the attainment of the perfection of the ego ideal. In the next chapter, I examine in more detail Freud's views on shame, but for now let me suggest that he left the ego ideal and self-regard essentially unexamined after his 1914 work, choosing instead to pursue guilt as a response to oedipal conflict, the intrapsychic tension between ego, id, and superego, between wish and defense.

Schafer (1960) has noted this distinction by referring to the ego ideal as "the loving function" of the superego in contrast with its "punitive function." It was the punitive superego, however, that dominated the conflict-drive psychology of Freud's seminal work, as he turned from narcissism, the ego ideal, and self-esteem to the neuroses in evolution of the structural theory, Wurmser (1981) has made a similar point. Thus, signal anxiety, oedipal conflicts, repression, and the drives were taken as the cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory, with guilt and anxiety underscored as the manifestations of conflict between the intrapsychic components. Shame was not readily assimilated into psychoanalytic conflict theory as it might have been had Freud pursued a fuller elaboration of narcissism. It was not until the more recent developments of ego psychology that interest returned to the study of narcissism and the self, and with this an opening to the understanding of shame emerged.

Why did Freud not significantly pursue his study of narcissism and its rich manifestations as sketched in his 1914 paper? Certainly, second guessing motivation about such a historical turn is at best hazardous. The manifest fruit of Freud's labors may be justification enough to explain the direction of his interests. Yet, from the perspective of one interested in shame and narcissism, the question remains intriguing, and a sociopolitical answer suggests itself. It seems likely that Freud's relative lack of interest in shame might have been an unintentional but inevitable outcome of the historical evolution of psychoanalysis.

For example, Freud's attention to libidinai manifestations, their repression in response to intrapsychic conflict, and their representation in the unconscious-the essence of his conceptualization of psychoanalysis-is known to have reflected his defense of these discoveries against dilution by premature incursions from ego psychology, conscious mental phenomena, and social interaction. Protecting "the gold of psychoanalysis" he may well have shown less interest in the elaboration of such other phenomena as narcissism and its manifestations. This historical evolution may have related also to Freud's conflict with Alfred Adler, whom Freud had expelled from the psychoanalytic movement in 1911.

In a scholarly review of the development of Adler's theories, and Adler,s relationship to Freud in the organization of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Stepansky (1983) has elucidated the course of the inevitable split between the two men. Without elaborating here the details of Adler's thinking outlined in that study, we can summarize Adler's theory as focusing on "organ inferiority," leading to generalized inferiority feelings; resultant "masculine protest" as a manifestation of an aggressive drive to deal with these feelings; and the universal wish to defend against the feminine and assert the masculine ("psychic hermaphroditism"). While Freud accepted for some time Adler's contributions as supplementary to psychoanalytic principles, he ultimately rejected them as antagonistic to the theory of libido and repression and spent subsequent years elaborating the content of unconscious processes and the structure and defenses of the mental apparatus.

One need not fully endorse Adler's formulations to see how close they come to a framework that would allow for shame and its manifestations (although, interestingly, Adler himself never did so). Organ inferiority and inferiority feelings, masculine protest and aggression (which have been viewed as typical reactions instigated by shame; see Gilligan, 1976); and femininity (related by Freud to passivity and passive longings, discussed with regard to shame by Lewis, 1971, and Anthony, 1981)-each may be viewed as a major expression of, or defense against, the experience of shame. Seen from a different perspective, these qualities relate also to the attributes of primary and secondary narcissism, with libidinal cathexis of the ego, the beginnings of internalized object relations, and elucidation of the ego ideal and self-regard, which Freud (1914) described in "On Narcissism." However, the relationship of these constructs to Adler's "Individual Psychology" (Adler, 1907, 1912, 1929) may well have consolidated Freud!s subsequent turn away from narcissism as he built the edifice of psychoanalysis. It was not that Freud explicitly denied the importance of shame in psychic development, but rather that he turned elsewhere to develop a system that was clearly differentiated from those of his various detractors. Thrane (1979) has made a similar point with regard to Adler.

Whether or not we fully accept this speculative hypothesis about the influence of historical forces on the direction of Freud's theoretical foundation for psychoanalysis, the conclusion is clear: Freud's structural theory emphasized the importance of guilt rather than shame as a central dysphoric affect; clearly related as it was to intrapsychic conflict. This emphasis assured a delay in attention to shame as an important focus of study until the structural theory itself was modified and opened up by the next generation of analysts. (This process of theoretical change will be considered in chapters 2 through 5, following a consideration of shame in Freud's writings.) I believe, however, that there are also additional explanations for the low profile of shame.

Building upon the values of psychoanalysis propounded by Freud, guilt was viewed as the more worthy affective experience compared with shame. Guilt is the result of activity, a transgression against a superego barrier (Piers, 1953), and a response to intrapsychic conflict. Palliation comes through confession and forgiveness. Shame, on the other hand, reflects passivity, a failure or defect of the whole self. Shame has been viewed as the developmentally more primitive affect (Jacobson, 1964), a product of oral need and anal failure (in contrast to oedipal longings); Tomkins (1962-63) even included shame as one of the innate, inborn emotions. Others have viewed shame disparagingly as inevitably embedded in a social matrix, in contrast to the intrapsychic origins of guilt. Each of these factors has, I believe, influenced the feeling among psychoanalysts that shame is somehow more superficial, and thus less worthy of attention, than guilt. Such assumptions will be considered later, for they certainly play a part in the relatively distant place accorded shame in most clinical considerations.

I have already suggested that shame induces hiding and concealment, thus making it more difficult to ferret out in clinical work. Patients recoil from facing their shame-and the failures, senses of defect, inferiority, and passivity that engender it. Patients often express, instead, defenses against, and displaced manifestations of, shame- certain depressions, mania, rage, envy, and contempt (see chapters 8 and 9). Because shame is so often unspoken, many therapists have not appreciated its importance in analytic and therapeutic work. Frequently it is hidden behind the clearly defensive manifestations of distress, and these are usually investigated alone-often from the perspective of intrapsychic conflict and related dynamics-without appreciation of the underlying or accompanying shame.

Moreover, the shame of patients is contagious, often resonating with the clinician's own shame experiences-the therapist's own sense of failure, self-deficiency, and life disappointments. Painful countertransference feelings may thus be generated in the analyst/ therapist, feelings that he or she, like the patient, would just as soon avoid, feelings that not infrequently lead to a collusion, preventing investigation of the shame experience. Frequently the therapist's own analysis or psychotherapy will not have explored shame, and thus both patient and therapist share various methods of concealment, blind spots unavailable to analytic exploration. As Levin (1971) also noted, then, the pain of shame, and the fear of rejection and abandonment, may affect the therapist as well as the patient.

In order for shame to gain prominence within psychoanalytic study, elaboration of the structural theory was necessary. Hartmann's (1939) contributions to ego psychology amplified and enriched classical psychoanalytic theory; he (Hartmann; 1950) again examined narcissism, defining it as "the libidinal cathexis not of the ego but of the self7 (p. 85). Hartmann and Loewenstein (1962) detailed the construct of the ego ideal within the superego. Jacobson (1964) regarded the self as an experiencing entity more global than the intrapsychic structures; she introduced self- and object representations (that is7 the symbolic, internalized personae of external reality) into ego psychology. Finally, more recent recognition of narcissism by Kohut (1971, 1977, 1984), Kernberg (1975), and others has opened a path for the optimal investigation of shame, as indicated by many recent contributions to the shame literature (Thrane, 1979; Broucek, 1982; Kinston, 1983; Morrison, 1983).

With this brief historical review of some of the salient themes in psychoanalysis that inform my approach to the study of shame, we come to some principal questions about shame to which we will return again and again in this book. These questions reappear and shape various portions of the Theoretical and Clinical Sections (though not necessarily in tidy fashion.) I will restate them in the Epilogue and will there reconsider them on the basis of material that, by then, will be familiar to the reader.

Guiding Questions

1. Is shame to be viewed as a defense against exhibitionism/ grandiosity (and other drive manifestations); or is it best understood as an affect? Freud (1895, 1896, 1900, 1905) was ambiguous on this point. He viewed shame as a reaction formation against the wish for genital exhibitionism and expression of other sexual impulses and perversions; saw shame as socially useful, directing sexual energy away from the self and toward tasks necessary for the preservation of the species. Lowenfeld (1976) has made a similar point about the potential utility of shame in preserving the mores of society. Freud also considered shame to be a result of anxiety, which is "objective" and social, reflecting fear of rejection and disapproval by others.

Thus, shame can be viewed as a defense, a reaction formation against the wish/drive to exhibit. Interestingly, Kohut's position on shame (see chapter 5) was in many ways similar to Freud's. Kohut (1971, 1972) considered shame to be a reflection of what he called the "vertical split," in which the ego is in danger of being overwhelmed by unbridled grandiosity. Hence; shame protects against the breakthrough of grandiosity and consequently serves a defensive function. For Levin (1967, 1971) also, shame is a signal, alerting the ego, through anticipatory shame anxiety, to the danger of future shame if action is not taken to protect the self.

Clearly, though, shame is also a painful affect, even when viewed as a signal to modify behavior, to repress wishes, or to hide. As indicated earlier, Tomkins (1962-63) viewed shame as one of the basic affects, generating its own set of facial expressions (see chapter 4). Many authors (for example, Piers, 1953; Lynd, 1958; Lewis, 1971; Thrane, 1979) have stressed the relationship between shame and guilt. I have suggested elsewhere (Morrison, 1983,1984a, b) that shame is a painful feeling central to narcissistic disorders and plays a role analogous to that which guilt plays in neurosis.

Are these viewpoints contradictory, or can shame be seen simultaneously as a painful affect, as a signal of danger from underlying grandiosity and exhibitionism, and as a defense against these (and other) phenomena and drive derivatives? I consider this matter further in chapters 2, 7, and 8.

2. Can shame be fully understood within the context or structured (conflict-defense) psychology, or must a broader psychology of the self and its deficits be invoked? Here the controversy is joined about whether self-psychology adds anything new to conflict theory, or whether it is really old wine in a new bottle. Certainly the early discussions of shame were from a classical, ego-psychological perspective. Piers (1953) defined shame as a reflection of tension between the ego and the ego ideal, representing a failure to attain a goal of the ego ideal. One manifestation of this tension is the negative comparison of the self and its body parts to others, which comparison leads to feelings of inferiority; the relationship of this perspective to Adler's (1907) "organ inferiority" is obvious. Feldman (1962) postulated a drive "to be the center of attention" (p. 382); analogous to Freud's thoughts about exhibitionism. Thus, Feldman introduced the role of external reality as a source of conflict with id drives leading to the shame response. As noted earlier, even Kohut (1971) originally viewed shame from the perspective of a conflict model, although shame was seen not as the result of the failure of the ego to meet the demands of a rigid ego ideal, but as the response of the ego flooded by unneutralized grandiosity, with the ego ideal standing as guardian and protector against grandiosity. Wurmser (1981) also considered an exhibitionistic drive as he underscored the relationship of shame to a defensive need to hide (a reaction formation) and its reflection in patients' feelings of unlovability. Annie Reich (1960) related shame to narcissism by noting oscillations of feelings from grandiosity to worthlessness and dejection, alternations that reflect wide shifts in self-esteem for certain narcissistic patients. Reich believed that objects are used by such patients in an attempt to stabilize self-esteem, leading to fluctuation of idealization and contempt toward self and others.

Clearly, then, the consideration of shame by many psychoanalytic thinkers has been rooted in the structural model, but, I suggest, these formulations are limited in their scope. A different, wider pathway to viewing shame derives from Erikson's (1950) elaboration of autonomy and shame and doubt. Lynd (1958) related shame to the search for identity, and Lewis (1971) further contended that shame reflects feelings about the whole self. Thus, with a consideration of identity and the self as central to the experience of shame, I believe that the analytic emphasis shifted from structural conflict to problems of narcissism. Certainly there remains much disagreement within the psychoanalytic community about the relationship of conflict and drives to narcissism (Morrison, 1986a), but most people would agree that some construct of "self" is essential in considerations about narcissism. It is a major contention of this book that shame is a crucial dysphoric affect in narcissistic phenomena. If this is so, can shame best be explained within the framework of drive-defense (conflict) theory, or is a separate emphasis on the self and its vicissitudes necessary?

Kohut (1966) introduced the concept of a separate developmental line for narcissism, but even in 1971 he was attempting to work within the parameters of conflict...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction and Overview
• A Theoretical Framework
• Some Theoretical Perspectives on Shame
• Primitive Object Relations, Early Narcissism, and Shame
• Shame and Narcissism
• Shame and Self Psychology Kohut's Contributions
• Clinical Applications
• The Case of Mr. Dowland
• Some Shame-Related Phenomena
• Shame and Defense
• Shame and Narcissistic Pathology
• Shame and Neurotic (Differentiated Character) Conditions
• Shame and Manic-Depressive Illness
• Epilogue
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index