The Shame Experience

Susan Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135062002
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews illuminating the phenomenology of shame in the general public, Miller systematically explores the various dimensions of the shame experience. The complex relationships between shame and female sexual development, shame and phallic inhibition, and shame and orality are among the topics critically reexamined.

1 Semantic Issues in the Study of Feeling States

We ought to say a feeling of and and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by. . . . Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. The Empiricists have always dwelt on its influence in making us suppose that where we have a separate name, a separate thing must needs be there to correspond with it; and they have rightfully denied the existence of the mob of abstract entities, principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidence than this could be brought up. But they have said nothing of that obverse error . . . of supposing that where there is no name, no entity can exist. All dumb, or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been cruelly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts "about" this object or "about" that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus, the greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the substantive parts have continually gone on.

—William James (1890)

William James' words doubly chasten our thinking about feeling. We ought to speak to the nameless feelings—the and's, but's, and if's that invite no substantial name like shame or guilt. And periodically we should suspect "shame," "guilt," and "disgust," our solid citizens, of fraud: They may promise more meaning than they can deliver. The relationship between states and words that propose to label states is complex. Some writers and researchers invest great faith in the common labels of states. They begin their inquiries into emotion with these labels, which they take to be highly significant categorizations of experience. They see the entire domain of emotional experience as fully describable by a list of "the emotions." Entries on the list vary from writer to writer, but all are familiar emotion words of the language. A typical list of the emotions includes shame, guilt, surprise, joy, disgust, fear, anger, contempt, and interest (Izard, 1971). Other writers reject the orientation toward emotions as discrete events, moments of recognizable contempt or surprise or anger. Emotion is omnipresent as the qualitative or tonal aspect of consciousness. It is "the colorfulness of human life" (Goldstein, 1951, p. 33), or the comprehension that one's "well-being is implicated in a transaction, for better or worse" (Lazarus, 1984, p. 124). Shevrin (1978) refers to affects as "a form of awareness or cognition. . . . [I]n higher organisms they play an everwidening role because they provide important information about the state of vital internal processes" (p. 269). The concept of emotion or feeling as defined by these writers recognizes an essential similarity between the moment of joy, the second of hesitation before crossing a busy street, and the feeling of pleasantly cool water on the hand. Each has a feeling component, a component of the self experiencing the inner and outer worlds and their significance for one's state of being. The moment of joy is experienced intensely. It is strong and clear, and it is remembered as a moment centrally defined by its feeling aspect. In the moment before the street-crossing, the sense of caution and analytic attention may occur alongside thoughts about the evening's plans. The person is half-immersed in one activity, half in the other. Minutes later he or she may not remember the feeling of cautious scanning associated with crossing the busy street. Nevertheless, the feeling aspect of that moment differs in no essential way from the feeling in the moment of joy. Both forms of feeling represent the basic human capacity for sensing the personally meaningful activity of the mind and body.

Those concerned with listing the emotions often proceed to schematize them. Particular emotions are designated as signal-scanning emotions (Engel, 1962, 1963), emotions of partial or fused drives (Engel, 1963), expectancy emotions (Panksepp, 1982), or recognition emotions (De Rivera, 1977). Scores of such taxonomies have been suggested. Certain problems attend these efforts, and here we return to James. The emotion categories themselves command more respect than they deserve. We are asked to believe that all emotional experiences fit nicely into 9, or 12, or 20 categories. But this assumption contradicts experience. Most people do not easily state the difference between shame and guilt for example. Nor do they easily place their experiences within one or the other category. The second problem attending taxonomies of emotions as types A, B, or C is that no particular significance is identified for the typologies established. Writers proceed as if their goal is to arrive at a single, correct classification of the emotions. They imply that some such correct classification eventually will be discovered or established. An alternative approach endorsed by Novey (1963) recognizes that all classifications are artificial in that each represents a point of view imposed on the data, not an identification of the fundamental order of emotional events. Feelings may be grouped together because their neurological components are similarly activated. Or a classification schema may reflect felt similarities or psychodynamic relatedness. For example, one emotion might function as a reaction-formation against the other. Or evolutionary relatedness may be introduced as an organizer as in the case of Knapp's (1967) conceptualization of shame and disgust as nature's appetite-curbing mechanisms. Just as psychoanalytic writers recognize that psychological events can be analyzed from multiple viewpoints—dynamic, economic, genetic, structural, and adaptive—emotion theorists must recognize that typologies of emotion represent particular points of view. The value of adopting any one point of view should be specified. For example, a typology might be useful in relation to a specific line of research. When each writer presents his or her classification schema as the ultimate classification of the emotions, endless unproductive controversy follows.

If we disdain emotion names and typologies altogether and refuse to grant them any meaning, we encounter other difficulties. From an evolutionary standpoint, such lists of basic feelings may have significance. Data exist to support the notion that certain clusters of behaviors, especially facial expressions and body postures, appear across cultures and sometimes across species. Some of these behavior clusters emerge at predictable points in the individual's development (Darwin, 1872). These data of universal facial and postural expression must be integrated into concepts of emotion. Our aim though should be to give the data their due significance, and no more. We can recognize that certain emotional expressions, probably indicative of felt experience, are inherited as potentials, some of which express themselves in early infancy and some later in childhood. Whatever experience attends these expressions might then contribute to the development of an individual's store of remembered feeling experiences. The inherited expressions and feeling capacities would also contribute powerfully to the individual and cultural process of categorizing emotion. Thus we find that the obvious emotion-expressions generally have associated names (e.g., disgust) that designate reasonably clear categories of experience. The fact that some well defined expressions are passed on through the genes ought not, however, to compel us to believe that the whole enterprise of categorizing feeling has been established hereditarily. Guilt appears to have no inherited expressions but it is a meaningful, uniquely human category that is related to but (for most people) not interchangeable with shame. We may inherit the blueprint for an expression of disgust and for a rudimentary feeling that is largely a bodily affair, but with time and experience the category, disgust, rooted undoubtedly in the universal esophageal peristalsis, becomes greatly enriched, beyond such a basic format, for each individual. Each person's disgust category will share certain elements with each other person's, but the individual variation in category formation will remain as interesting as the common ground. Also, we find some people fussy about naming their feelings. They decline to find a place for all that they experience in one of the basic groupings named with single words. Others care little for the precise matching of label to experience, and they settle for approximate convergences.

Another confusing practice involving emotion names is that of using a label like shame or anxiety without reference to actual felt experience. Piers and Singer's (1953) discussion of shame exemplifies this practice. They explicitly state that they do not intend "shame" to refer to feeling, but to "a distinctly differentiated form of inner tension (p. 17). . . . Shame arises out of a tension between the ego and the ego ideal" (p. 23). Thus their reference is structural, psychoanalytically speaking. What relationship have these structures to experience? Translated into experiential language, Piers and Singer's use of "tension" implies either conscious, experienced tension or tension existing at a non-conscious level between neurological structures that (a) represent structural products of conscious or unconscious mental processes and (b) continue to give rise to and undergo modification by conscious mental processes. Such tension is said to exist between the ego and the ego ideal. "Ego ideal" can be paraphrased as a constellation of images of how one wishes the self to be. I am not certain how to paraphrase "ego" in this context, but I believe Piers and Singer mean to refer to tension between that which one wishes to be and that which one is. However one understands their use of ego, the claim of no experiential referent allows them to group a vast number of rather different experiences under one term. Piers and Singer believe that these diverse experiences all relate to conscious or non-conscious confrontations that a person makes with some real or imaged personal inferiority. In response to such a confrontation, a person may feel ashamed, or angry, or lethargic, or depressed. But whatever the feeling experience, Piers and Singer label the situation shame based on their definition of shame as a tension between the ego and the ego ideal. This nonspecific use of "shame" discourages attention to the great variety of felt experiences (e.g., anger, depression, withdrawal, anxiety, or humiliation) with which a person may respond to a perception of failing. It also leads to confusion over whether conscious or unconscious mental activity is intended when a reference to shame is made. And it allows us to assume unconscious activity without confronting how and in what form such activity is psychologically meaningful.

Piers and Singer explicitly claim no experiential referent. Their clarity on this point helps to keep their intended meaning apparent. But the use of feeling labels without intention to designate felt experience at times can cause greater confusion. Typically, these problems occur when a feeling label is used to denote some state or situation that is assumed to motivate the actually experienced state. "Anxiety" is often designated as the cause for behavioral symptoms, ideas, or other experienced feelings, when no experienced anxiety is intended. Such uses of "anxiety" are difficult to avoid. They have great explanatory power; nevertheless, they should be avoided. They circumvent the important theoretical question of what actually is happening, consciously or unconsciously, that produces an outcome we naively might expect to result from experienced anxiety. If one restricts the use of affect labels to the domain of felt experience, one challenges oneself to specify (to whatever extent possible) the form of those events that do not feel like anxiety, but have an anxiety-like impact on some aspect of functioning.

When words such as anxiety are used without reference to felt experience, often it is implied that the relevant events take place outside of consciousness. Most writers reject phrases like "unconscious anxiety" or "unconscious experience" because they involve such an apparent contradiction in terms, but psychoanalytic clinical theory and metapsychology assume events outside of consciousness that are in some ways equivalent to felt emotion. For example, an unconscious event might equate with experienced anxiety in its impact on defenses. Postulation of unconscious events that profoundly influence consciousness at times appears to be well justified. Clinical observation constantly calls for such a concept. However, once the concept has been integrated into clinical explanation, it opens the door to a number of abuses. One such abuse relevant to the study of emotion is the practice of too quickly labeling as unconscious all formulations of a patient's experience that the clinician can articulate but the patient apparently cannot. The designation "dynamic unconscious" should be reserved for that which is completely and totally unavailable to introspection yet clearly of consequence in determining an individual's actions, feelings, or thoughts. Many states of consciousness are difficult to verbalize. Often the individual who experiences them barely attends to them and may forget them quickly. Yet such inarticulate states are conscious states, and they may contain rich data about the self and its motives. The central position in psychoanalytic theory of a concept of unconscious events that influence consciousness may draw attention away from many states of inarticulate consciousness too quickly labeled unconscious. For example, a male patient's free associations might abound with castration imagery and with themes of shame. From these data the clinician might conclude that the patient is ashamed of his sense of himself as castrated. But when confronted with the question of whether he feels ashamed, the patient denies any such feelings because he has not conceptualized his shifting, weakly attended feeling states in terms of the category, shame. Persuaded by the themes within the clinical material, the clinician concludes that the feeling, or some physiological equivalent of it, is fully unconscious. And the assumption is made that at some earlier point in the person's life the designated feeling probably was experienced in a clear and specific form that initiated defensive consequences. Novey (1963) states the clinician's position well:

Clinically, one occasionally observes behavioral patterns which one has reason to believe are related to certain emotional states. It is a tantalizing problem, indeed, when the actual feeling state as experienced and reported by the patient seems incongruous with the accompanying behavioral pattern. I should suppose that based upon the observational data, this is about all one would be entitled to say. In practice, however, we are in the habit of making logical, perhaps dangerous, assumptions about linkages, presumed to be present and as yet unrevealed, between the behavioral pattern, for instance, and some emotional experience not within the realm of specific awareness—and we do this despite the paradox of talking of the feeling which is not felt! As indefensible as this position may be on many grounds, it has the virtue of clinical usefulness and a classificatory system of affects must, at least if it is to be useful to the clinician, take cognizance of such observations, (p. 298)

Although Novey gives it no further attention in his brief article, the word "specific" modifying "awareness" deserves consideration. It is possible that the shame-denying person has absolutely no conscious data that could help to identify a shame potential in the self, but it is equally probable that the person does have some non-specific, conscious experience that when carefully introspected and articulated would add up to what we generally call shame. One may have no specific awareness of shame, that is, no fully articulated, readily recognized feeling, but yet have some experience, not yet put into words or concepts, that when scrutinized appears to be a shame-like experience. The therapeutic process of making the unconscious conscious in certain cases might be better described as making the inarticulate articulate. The reasons for emotional experience taking inarticulate form also deserve consideration. For example, some feeling states may have been vague and undefined, yet disturbing, even when first experienced in childhood. Others may have been strong and clear and they were rendered vague as part of a defensive quest for unconsciousness; or the vagueness may represent the influence of time and of the complex interplay of many frames of experience.

Gendlin (1962) calls this type of inarticulate experience preconceptual. Early infantile experience must be entirely preconceptual. At that early stage of life, ideas (i.e., relationships between states or perceptions) are felt; they are not articulated with words and formal concepts. Later in life, verbal expressions of ideas supplement and alter the felt experience. What is preconceptual is not unconscious but may appear to be because the subject may deny the experience when asked about it, and then, after further therapy, he or she may recognize the experience. The importance in psychoanalytic theory of the concept of the unconscious makes it easy for us to ignore distinctions between what may be strictly and entirely unconscious and what is conscious but remains in an inarticulate or transient form that makes conceptualization and study difficult. Individuals who are attentive to and comfortable with the inarticulate stream of consciousness make good reporters of such intermediate states. Those who distrust the inchoate inner world will quickly deny this unformed, inarticulate experience, and thus they will prevent it from reaching articulate form.

Inquiry into nuances of actually experienced emotion is not the sole legitimate domain of the study of emotion. But it does constitute an important area of study that has been undervalued—not in the practice of psychotherapy but in formal studies of emotion. A close look at the experienced content of a category such as shame ought to be of value in several respects. Such inquiry elucidates the meaning-fulness—or lack of meaningfulness—of the linguistic category itself. It tells us how seriously we can regard the category designation. And the inquiry shows us how various individuals struggle with relationships between language and actual experiences. What else should such inquiry reveal? Psychoanalysis is interested in depth psychology, that is, in core conflicts variously expressed, disguised, or avoided at the experiential surface of personality. Shame experience is implicated in some of these conflicts, for example, conflict over sexual exhibitionism. Psychoanalysis tells us that shame means more than or other than what it feels like it means. Shame means the opposite of what it feels like. It means reaction-formation. The experience is taken to be a deception that hides the true motivation enlivening the personality. How does psychoanalysis know these things? There are various routes to psychological knowing. One can discover empirically, for example by noting that a feeling suddenly disappears and is replaced by another feeling that is intelligible if regarded as a transformation of the original. Thus, self-hate in melancholia has been hypothesized to be a transformation of object hate. Extrapolation from theory is another route to knowing. Thus, De Rivera's (1977) theory of emotions predicts that certain feelings have opposites on key dimensions. When the opposites cannot be found they are assumed to be undiscovered but still existent, just as the presence of the planet Pluto could be predicted, according to certain natural law...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Semantic Issues in the Study of Feeling States
• Chapter 2 Literature Review
• Chapter 3 Research Method
• Chapter 4 Meanings and Uses of Feeling Words
• Chapter 5 Shame Themes in Interview Data
• Chapter 6 Shame in the Dynamic Interplay Between Feeling States
• Chapter 7 Individual Patterns of Shame Experience
• Chapter 8 Conclusions
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index