Shame in Context

Susan Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134892013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this enlightening and gracefully written study, Susan Miller examines shame in a variety of clinical contexts en route to a richer understanding of shame dynamics. Miller attends especially to the role of shame in creating and maintaining character pathology and devotes separate sections of the book to shame in the context of obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, and masochistic personality organizations. Within each of these clinical contexts, a chapter of theoretical discussion is followed by a chapter of engaging case examples.

Integral to Shame in Context is Miller's informed and thoughtful critique of current theories about shame, including those of Broucek, Morrison, Schore, Wurmser, Nathanson, and Kinston. In reviewing the contributions of these and other writers, she is most concerned with achieving a balanced comprehension of shame that incorporates the insights of different theoretical perspectives without embracing the selective emphases of any one investigator or school of thought. Like Freud, she appreciates the defensive utility of shame, but she attends equally to the painful and at times pathogenic acpects of shame experiences. In line with more recent shame literature, she emphasizes the pathogenicity of early shaming, but she is equally sensitive to the role of shame in sustaining character defenses. And she goes beyond the purview of other shame researchers in examining the ways in which individuals unconsciously seek to maintain shame experiences when these experiences sustain their personality organizations.

Offering a critical evaluation and synthesis of contemporary shame theories, and culminating in a balanced clinical understanding of shame in its various contexts, Shame in Context takes its place as, in the words of Frances Broucek, "the most sophisticated and definitive clinical study of shame to date."

C H A P T E R 1

Foundations

It is a cramped little state with no foreign policy,

Save to be thought inoffensive. The grammar of the language

Has never been fathomed, owing to the national habit

Of allowing each sentence to trail off in confusion…

And it must be said of the citizens (muttering by

In their ratty sheepskins, shying at cracks in the sidewalk)

That they lack the peace of mind of the truly humble.

—Richard Wilbur (“Shame”)

Following a long fallow period, the shame literature entered a season of proliferation. What we have harvested from that span of rapid growth is now sufficient that it seems wise to pause and survey the yield in order to consider which beginnings merit future investment. Therein lies the broad incentive for the present work. A more specific impetus has been a personal impression that the recent explosion of shame literature in psychology, psychoanalysis, and the popular culture has begun to exert a reductionistic effect on clinical thinking. Among shame theorists, the centrality of shame as an acknowledged motive force threatens to skew clinical thinking so that shame is recognized to the exclusion of other emotions, and full regard for the complex clinical phenomena with which it interacts is lost. One sometimes gets the sense that shame is the only emotion that drives human behavior, in which case we are headed toward an overcorrection of the emotion's longstanding neglect.

It would be regrettable if increased sensitivity to one important aspect of life were to dull our perception of others, including some that once were quite apparent, such as the role shame plays in individuals' attempts to circumvent areas of conflict or difficulty or to maintain highly invested fantasies. Guilt, which often shows itself in action and symptom formation more than in feeling, has been an early casualty. In my 1985 book, I argued that shame is not fundamentally a defense but is an expression of narcissistic distress that can be used defensively. I continue to hold that view but am concerned now that the study of defensive, self-protective, and homeostatic functions that shame fulfills has been overshadowed by our valid interest in shame as a primary emotional response, one that is especially implicated in narcissistic disorders.

Expanded interest in shame has led writers to lift it from its varied natural settings in order to hold it up to the light of study. With some notable exceptions, when shame has been studied in context, it has been viewed only in the context of narcissism, since its importance there is so conspicuous. While it is necessary and important to think about shame as an entity that preserves certain of its aspects regardless of setting, isolating shame as a subject for study has led to certain distortions in our thinking. These distortions are akin to those that arise when a living thing is removed from the field to the laboratory and examined in isolation from its ecosystem.

In the field of wildlife management, attention is shifting from single-species management to ecosystem management as understanding of the interdependence of living systems grows. Within the mental health sciences, we have concepts such as family systems or intersubjectivity; these ideas emphasize interacting parts of a system, rather than individual components. The present study is an effort to consider shame as a dynamic element within the overall ecology of mental functioning. It is an element that has a place both in sickness and in health and one that cannot be well understood apart from other emotions or from the dynamic dimensions of psychic life, which include conflicts, defenses, adaptations, fantasies and self-protective mechanisms. I begin the present exploration from the point of view that an emotion such as shame is a structure that has multiple functions—or multiple ecological niches, to extend the metaphor—within the individual personality and for communities of individuals as well.

Inquiry is complicated by the fact that shame, like all emotion labels, represents an indistinctly bounded category of feeling and behavior. Wurmser (1981) states and I concur, “This means that shame in its typical features is complex and variable, a range of closely related affects rather than one simple, clearly delimited one. It shades into moods on one side, into attitudes on the other” (p. 17). Though shame has a range of meanings, it always refers to a moment of felt experience or at least to the potential for such experience; thus, it is a level of concept different from those often used in discussions of psychopathology. Frequently, in considering psychological dynamics, we refer to the patient's circumstances in broad terms, saying, for example, that his self-esteem is deficient or that she behaves narcissistically. Emotions may be implied, but they are not stated. The study of shame or of any specified emotion is an attempt to consider actual moments of experience, which we characterize as precisely as possible.

One can question whether some of the emotional experiences writers tend to assemble under “shame”—embarrassment, for example, or humiliation—belong within the same tent at all. Different writers have idiosyncratic ways of dividing the whole. Lewis (1992) tentatively suggests that shame and embarrassment might be considered separate, distinguishable states, but many others (Broucek, 1991) feel that these clearly are variations on a theme. Wurmser (1981) refers to “shame or its cognate feelings of embarrassment and put down, of slight and humiliation, or of shyness, bashfulness, and modesty” (p. 17). The various efforts at categorization have value not because of any likelihood they will yield a final set of categories, but because they represent careful efforts at highlighting the features that characterize particular states and link them with, or differentiate them from, other states.

A recent statistical study by Hibbard (1994) lends support to an inclusive shame category (that subsumes, among other states, disgrace, mortification, shyness, and embarrassment) as one that is meaningful to the average, English-speaking person on the street but is also meaningfully subdividable into factors. It is a similarly inclusive category that I wish to consider in the pages to follow. The decision to explore a comprehensive and imprecise category makes for many difficulties. Accordingly, some writers have narrowed their definitions of shame to focus attention on the particular shame variety related to their area of theoretical interest. For example, Kohut, who was interested in infantile exhibitionism and its relationship to narcissism, looked at the form of shame that occurs when the grandiosity of the narcissistic adult is stimulated. I will attempt to consider shame that develops in diverse clinical and nonclinical contexts and for individuals at different stages of the life cycle, though I do so with some trepidation because the incorporation of so many variables can be treacherous.

Achieving a definition of this indistinct category humans call shame is no easy matter. One feels a bit like a preschooler, in pursuit of a circle, who must repeat his effort over and over, finding that each pass of the crayon inscribes a different form: all one can hope for are decent areas of overlap. Throughout the remainder of this book, I will use shame in two ways. First, along with Wurmser, Nathanson, Hibbard, and many others, I use it to designate a family of related emotions. Each member of the family is characterized by an experience of the self as inadequate, or at least in disarray, thus not comfortably exposable to others; also present is the urge to hide, silence, vacate, or instantly reform the disturbed self. The reference to disarray, as opposed to inadequacy, is added to extend the shame category so as to include embarrassment, which is one of the more distinct of the shame subtypes. By disarray, I mean a state of disorganization that leaves the person feeling not presentable to others: he may be thinking unclearly, or be half dressed, half asleep, or overexcited. As indicated earlier, some would sever embarrassment from shame altogether, but most treat it as within the shame family because it holds thematic and physiognomic common ground with the other shame group emotions. The shame group of emotions as I define it would include embarrassment, humiliation, self-consciousness, disgrace, and a number of other states, some of which I considered in more detail in my earlier book than I will do here. “Feeling bad” fits within the shame group only when the state includes some representation of viewing the bad self and feeling deficient as a consequence of what one perceives.

The inadequate or diminished self of shame is in some instances primarily experienced through a regressive alteration of the behavioral self, for example, slouching, blushing, mumbling, or loss of intellectual acuity. At other times, functional disorder combines with painfully negative ideas about the self to produce a composite that is shame. Painful ideas alone may constitute the shame experience; no broad influence on the person's behavioral state need occur. The thread through all varieties of shame experience, including those as divergent as moral shame (i.e., shame over immoral behavior), deep humiliation, and passing embarrassment, is the diminished or disordered self and the self one would wish to hide from others (though one may maintain concurrent wishes to display it). Whenever I do not specify my intended usage, I am using this first, broader meaning of shame as a family of emotions.

The second way in which I will use shame will be as the designation for one particular member of the larger group. I think of this type of shame as “shame proper.” I hope I will not be accused of generating multiple referents for shame to promote complexity or confusion; I am trying to reflect as accurately as possible the usage of the word shame in our language and literature, which is unfortunately varied and confusing and, to make matters worse, shifts over time (W. Miller 1993). Shame, in its more restricted usage, is distinct from embarrassment, mortification, humiliation, and other shame variants because of the distinctly reflexive character of the experience. Shame proper is the experience that generates the phrase, to be ashamed of oneself. Such a construction is not present for other shame group words. One is not bashful of oneself or humiliated of oneself or shy of oneself or embarrassed of oneself. These other states do, in fact, involve looking at the self or listening to the self and sensing the self as a social being perceivable by others, but used in its narrower sense, shame stands apart in its clearer emphasis on viewing the self and subjecting the self to one's own negative feeling or judgment.

This more restricted version of shame is worth isolating because it calls attention to important human experiences in which a person, in public or in private, considers and judges his own actions and finds them lacking, concluding in the end, “I feel ashamed of myself.” My description of shame proper is not likely to call to mind the shame states Kohut and others primarily interested in failed exhibitionism describe. Their shame profiles emphasize the red-faced, overstimulated, socially discomforted state of the person, not the inner experience of self-appraisal. Speaking metapsychologically, Kohut (1972) spoke of “this disorganized mixture of massive discharge (tension decrease) and blockage (tension increase) in the area of exhibitionistic libido which is experienced as shame” (p. 395).

Descriptions of a person suffused both with sensation and emotion, and standing visible to others, make many people, myself included, think of the descriptor embarrassment, but others would balk at using that term to refer to Kohut's intended subject matter because, for them, embarrassment connotes a trivial disturbance of equanimity. My own inclination is to say that embarrassment can be trivial or agonizing but is distinguishable from shame proper in the lesser attention to abiding defects of the self. In embarrassment, one is primarily concerned with the visible self, not with a lasting sense of being flawed. So if red-faced, hyper-stimulated states of failed exhibitionism bring a judgment of inner defect, however inarticulate in form, then I would classify them as shame proper. If they primarily focus one's attention on the other's watching eyes and on one's current state of psychic disarray, then I am content to call them embarrassment, which in its intensity may be slight or stunning.

Embarrassment is always an excited state of social visibility, and shame proper may be at times, as long as the element of self-judgment is present. Such excited states frequently betray an element of pleasure. Hibbard (1994) groups embarrassment under “libidinous shame.” He feels that libido, or pleasure, is implicated in selective shame states, such as embarrassment, because they represent benign, perhaps loving, superego activity through which the conscience gently restricts behavior. But libido is operative in the excited forms of shame in a second way: pleasurable impulses to display the self are alive in the moment. Embarrassment often is accompanied by a blush or laugh that exposes pleasure in the revelation of thoughts, feelings, or body. An example is the young child dashing naked through a room full of adults, in a state of squealing, excited embarrassment. In embarrassment, a person often holds to some sense of pleasure in his activity, while simultaneously responding to social cues (from outside or within) that the performance is questionable in its acceptability. Those cues may lead to shame proper or only to the mix of display and inhibition that constitutes embarrassment. In his observations of young children, Lewis (1992) noted the link between embarrassment and pleasure:

At the same time they averted their gaze, the children smiled broadly. This smile seems to differentiate embarrassment from shame. Finally, some children nervously touched their bodies with their hands, although they did not cover their faces with their hands. … It does appear that embarrassment can be differentiated from shame, at least in some situations [p. 26].

Lewis differentiated two types of embarrassment. One type, akin to shyness, is a discomforted response to exposure but implies no enduring negative self-evaluation. Another type, which Lewis sees as a low intensity form of shame, does involve negative self-judgment.

Unlike the metapsychological definition quoted from Kohut, the working definitions I have offered are phenomenological ones that aim to help us recognize shame as a group of felt experiences. Other definitions might be offered that would emphasize shame's functions: for example, the function of reducing one's interest in engaging with forbidden or dangerous activities or that of encouraging behavior in line with the conduct of the group. In looking at shame in its various contexts, it will be useful to consider both what shame feels like and how it operates and useful to consider as well its functioning at a number of different levels, including, for example, its operation within an economy of emotions, its operation as a species-wide occurrence with adaptive functions, and its operation as an experience that contributes to the individual's sense of self.

Returning now to the broader definition of shame as a family of feelings, we can conceive of the shame emotions as operating within a dynamic personality organization as a school of fish exists within the sea: there is some fluidity of shape and movement within the subject that is our primary focus and within the larger subject that is its context. In order to understand the operation of our subject, we must examine its internal structures and its relations to a variety of contexts.

Because shame is a label writers and researchers attach to a loosely bounded category of experiences and because this set of experiences fills a variety of functions in the individual personality and the social group, writers attempting to define too narrowly the function of shame or the single set of rules for its operation often excite into voice other writers who illuminate alternate functions or exceptions to the rule. For example, Broucek, (1991) reflects on the incomplete explanatory power of Kaufman's concept of “the interpersonal bridge” and says, “This is an example of a recurrent problem in existing theories of shame; no theory about the causes, sources, or mechanisms of shame adequately accounts for all characteristics of the shame experience” (p. 22). Broucek goes on to develop a theory of “objectification” that has admirable clarity and organizes much shame data but not all of it. In over-generalizing the applicability of this concept, he tends to exclude certain important findings regarding shame. His more recent writing on the topic (unpublished chapter) strives to correct this situation.

Many shame theories have been added to the literature in recent years. Like Broucek's, some have come in response to, and refutation of, others. Ways in which the previous theory failed to account for certain shame data are cited as support for the new theory. It has been my impression that quite a number of rather divergent-sounding theories have validity in that they well describe some piece of the whole that is shame, and they astutely examine how such shame operates in one of its various settings. But writers often fail to acknowledge that shame, like any emotion, is the proverbial elephant and that others may have well defined a trunk or tail or torso, whereas one's own exploration has uncovered a tusk; so what may be needed now is something closer to an overall anatomy.

I think of this book then as an integrative effort. I will draw on my own previous work and even more heavily on the work of others, especially those more recent writers whose work synthesizes what has preceded it. The number of writers examined will be limited in order to maintain some focus to the presentation; thus, I will give short shrift to many, especially the earlier writers whose contributions have been well-reviewed elsewhere. My overall aim is to place abstractions up against clinical data and the data of everyday life or life as portrayed within literature, in order to look at how the theories “play” in living contexts. Of course, the various abstractions grew from the soil of such everyday experience, but each writer has brought his own limited experience to his abstracting activity, so here will be an opportunity to hold various writers' abstractions against my own experiential base.

A second aim of this work is to extract points of difference and points of correspondence among important current ideas about shame, again using clinical material to illuminate the discussion. I will also examine shame as it operates within certain groups of individuals outside the consulting room, in the larger context of society, though that topic could support a much more complete treatment than I will give it here. In the last chapter, I will range furthe...