Shame and Jealousy

The Hidden Turmoils

Phil Mollon

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429919107
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

A volume in the Psychoanalytic Ideas Series, published for the Institute of Psychoanalysis by Karnac. Here, shame and jealousy are examined as hidden turmoils; as basic human feelings found in everyone but often suppressed and neglected. An unfulfilled need, unanswered plea for help, and failure to connect with and understand other people are all underlying causes for shame and feeling inadequate.The authorargues that feelings of shame form an intrinsic part of the analytic encounter but 'astonishingly, this shame-laden quality of the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic setting is rarely addressed. This lucidly written and much-needed volume explores the profound effects shame and jealousy can have on self-esteem and how this can eventually lead to a chronic condition.

CHAPTER ONE
Shame and jealousy

Panic in the classroom

A homosexual man in psychoanalytic psychotherapy was reflecting upon his residual feelings of anxiety about revealing his sexual orientation. He suddenly recalled an incident at school when he was age twelve. At that time, he had begun to notice a good-looking boy in another class and would often steal a secret glance at him. One day he found himself in the same class as this boy and suddenly believed he overheard him making some reference to his looking. Overwhelmed with shame and panic, and terrified the whole class would discover his secret, he fled from the room.

An anxious manager

A middle manager was required periodically to make business presentations to groups of staff. Mostly he managed this reasonably competently. However, during a period when he was feeling quite depressed he failed to make adequate preparations and also, to his horror, found that he was unable to ad lib and think on his feet in the way he usually had been able to. On one disastrous occasion he found himself completely lost for words, panicking, unable to think, sweating profusely, feeling about to faint—and basically suffering all the features of a panic attack. He felt profoundly humiliated and devastatingly shamed by his own failure and his vision of the surprised and concerned looks on the faces of his audience. Following this, he felt increasingly anxious about any prospect of having to make any kind of public presentation. Eventually he became completely disabled by shame anxiety.

A sexual assault

A young adolescent girl was cornered by a gang of slightly older teenagers. A youth in the group raped her in front of the others. None attempted to help her. Some laughed and jeered and encouraged the rapist. Following this, the girl became increasingly withdrawn, rarely leaving her house. She was haunted, not only by the horror of the assault itself, but also by the image of all the faces looking on at her without concern or empathy and by the thought of the story of her humiliation being spread maliciously around amongst all the youth of the small town. Some months later she had a psychotic breakdown, believing that she had been impregnated by the devil. The accumulating shame had reached intolerable levels. Eventually she made a serious suicide attempt. Shame can be lethal.

Violent responses to shame

A man who had experienced repeated scorn and humiliation from his mother, involving physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, was frequently in danger of falling into states of severely toxic shame. With his girlfriend he would often insist that she reassure him about the quality of his physical, mental, and sexual attributes, becoming enraged if she did not successfully support his fragile self-esteem and sense of masculinity. Sometimes, he would speak scornfully of other people, particularly older women, describing them as "pathetic" and would demand that his girlfriend agree with him. If she hesitated, he would launch into a tirade about how she was "pathetic", and on some occasions would terrify her with his violence. It was clear that this shame-ridden man was continually projecting his own self-image as "pathetic" into women representing his abusive mother (i.e. trying to send the shame back where it came from) and demanding his girlfriend's support in this projection. If she failed to comply, then he would attempt to force her, through his violence and intimidation to represent and experience the quality of "pathetic". Shame can be very dangerous.

The Hungarian psychoanalyst, Grunberger, gives the following example:

Some years ago there was an account in Canadian and other newspapers of how a drunkard behaved badly in a pub, and the owner asked him to leave; in other words, he was "treated like dirt". Afterwards he came back armed with a Molotov cocktail and "blew up the joint". There were no survivors. This can be explained as his desire to make his narcissistic injury null and void by causing all those who were witnesses to disappear.

[Grunberger, 1989, p. 37]

A vision of shame

A male student visited the flat of his new girlfriend, with whom he was very much in love, clutching a bunch of flowers for his beloved. Finding the door open, he ventured in. Through the open door to the bedroom, he saw her having sex with an old boyfriend. Engrossed in their pleasure, neither of the lovers were aware of his presence as he stood transfixed in horrified fascination. After a few seconds, he quickly but quietly retreated, feeling utterly mortified with shame and embarrassment. Later feelings of humiliation and anger developed. All that night his heart was pounding with such force that he feared his chest would burst. Because of these violent feelings of shame he could not bring himself to contact her. Indeed he wished, in part, that he might never see her again since he could not imagine how he could confront her with his observations without the two of them being consumed with shame and embarrassment. Shame can powerfully inhibit communication of what is most important in a relationship.

Pedro and Natalie

Some years ago I had the interesting opportunity to work with two people, Pedro and Natalie, who sought help as a couple, presenting with particular problems of shame and jealousy. Pedro clearly loved Natalie deeply, enjoying all forms of contact and interaction with her. He delighted in hearing her talk of her experiences, her thoughts, and feelings. In turn he found joy in sharing with her his most vulnerable hopes and dreams. She clearly loved him too. However, for reasons of fears of feeling trapped and suffocated in relationships, derived from her childhood experiences with an invasive and controlling mother, she would be compulsively promiscuous. She felt shame and guilt about this, but was convinced that her sexual adventures were necessary for her psychic survival—representing for her an affirmation of her autonomy and sense of agency and efficacy. In order not to hurt Pedro, she would try to conceal these from him—but they would usually emerge, partly because Pedro was very perceptive and attuned to her, and partly because her feelings of guilt would lead her to betray herself and reveal her deceit.

Pedro described his feelings and reactions at such times of discovery of her infidelities. He would experience a violent visceral response—pain in his stomach, his heart pounding, shivering and sweating—as his body was clearly flooded with adrenalin. He would also experience a sense of shock, accompanied by anxiety, anger, and panic. He would feel confused and disoriented. In addition he would feel shame. His sense of shame would be to do with feeling inadequate as a man, feeling humiliated by the thought of another man having penetrated the woman he loved, perhaps giving her more pleasure than he managed to, feeling weak and in need of reassurance that he was still loved—and, above all, shame to do with having these strong reactions.¹ This constellation of shame, jealousy, and panic would be exacerbated by Natalie's tendency to attempt to ward off Pedro's suspicions of her infidelities by denying and invalidating his intuitions and dismissing them as his jealous fantasies. Her well-meaning effort to avoid his encounter with a painful reality would add to the shocking impact of his eventual discoveries of the truth. Pedro would then feel utterly betrayed and tricked. Their previous intimacy would suddenly appear to him quite fraudulent. The love she had appeared to give him would seem devalued, since Pedro now imagined that she would give the same affection to any of her lovers. Natalie would become distraught at his reactions, feeling terribly guilty at his distress. She would endeavour to reassure him of her love in every way she could. Usually, after a week or two of experiencing her devoted affection and care, Pedro would forgive her again and begin once more to enjoy their time with each other—until the next episode of her infidelity. This painful cycle would repeat endlessly.

Another feature of Pedro's reactions would be that when he learned of her unfaithfulness he would have an odd sensation that she had suddenly become a stranger to him. He would feel that somehow he did not know her. It seems to be a fundamental human need to feel special and chosen—and much of the time this was indeed how Pedro felt in relation to Natalie. However, on discovering her extra-relational sexual liaisons, he would each time feel suddenly in the position of the excluded one—barred access to her intimacy that she experienced with an other—and barred from knowledge of it.

At times Natalie's involvements with other men would go further than brief sexual encounters. She would occasionally develop preoccupations with particular men, wanting continuing contact and, for a limited period, feeling she was in love. After a few weeks this would pass and her affections would again return to Pedro. During such times Pedro would sense her preoccupation and would feel intense anguish because he knew her mind was not open to his emotional communications. Although Natalie would not entirely ignore him, he would experience a subtle blankness in her response to him, as if his messages did not quite penetrate her mind but bounced off its surface. He would complain she was like a brick wall. Such remarks would puzzle her. Pedro would himself withdraw when he found Natalie in such a state, feeling a combination of shame and despair. His attempts to communicate with her seemed to him futile.

The painful cycle of interaction would be further driven by Natalie's experience of feeling her inner privacy to be agonizingly violated by Pedro's wishes to know of both her desires and her behaviour in relation to other men. This led Natalie to feel even more strongly that the integrity of her core self required that she be free to pursue other liaisons outside her main relationship with Pedro, which she would otherwise experience as unbearably suffocating. She would become even more withdrawn in response to his inquiries. Whilst Pedro tried his best to understand her need for inner space, privacy, and freedom, he experienced difficulty in containing his jealousy, further fuelled by Natalie's resistance to disclosing her extra-relational fantasies and behaviours. Moreover, he felt shame over his jealousy, no matter how inevitable and understandable this might be. He felt that his possessiveness drove Natalie to her promiscuity. When in the grip of this spiralling negative interaction, Pedro began to feel very inadequate. Natalie, in turn, felt immense shame and guilt that her compulsive behaviour caused Pedro such distress. It was in their despair at this repeating pattern of pain that this couple, who clearly loved each other dearly, sought psychotherapeutic help. Fortunately, their commitment to communication and their increasing empathy with each other's experience and position provided considerable relief and the negative interaction gradually decreased in intensity; Natalie began to experience less of a threat to her core self, and consequently was less driven to secret promiscuity, with the result that Pedro's jealousy and shame were less and less provoked.

Natalie's mother appeared to have been highly invasive and controlling, insisting that her daughter have no secrets from her. She would frequently demand to know Natalie's thoughts and feelings. Natalie's father was ejected by her mother when Natalie was aged five. This added to Natalie's image of her mother as terrifyingly controlling and powerful. Her fundamental "internal working model" of attachment relationships (Bowlby, 1980) was that she could be controlled and suffocated. Whilst she longed for intimacy and reliable love, she also desperately needed to feel free. This was a matter of the protection of her core sense of self and its need for autonomy. Pedro's mother had not been so invasive, but he had experienced her, at times, as alarmingly distant and withdrawn. He recalled how she would often appear deeply preoccupied, such that she would be physically but not emotionally present. During such periods Pedro's attempts to communicate his emotional needs would seem to be ignored or misunderstood by his mother. However, Pedro learned as a child that his mother's responsiveness to him would return after a period of time. The nature of her preoccupation and withdrawal was not clear to Pedro. He wondered whether she had experienced episodes of depression or whether she had had an affair during part of his childhood. Although his father had been present, he had, affectively, not been very available to Pedro, tending to spend his leisure hours at the pub or slumped in front of the television.

Themes of shame and jealousy with "Natalie and Pedro"

Jealousy and shame are intimately entwined in the tragic interaction between Pedro and Natalie. She was defending against the threat of violation of her core self—a catastrophe involving ultimate exposure of her inner privacy and surrender to control by an other. Such violation of the core self can be experienced as a rape of the mind—indeed of the soul—and as damaging, potentially, as a physical rape. The emotional response to violation is shame. Natalie's ensuing promiscuity evoked jealousy in Pedro, also giving rise to his feelings of shame associated with a sense of inadequacy. His spiral of shame gathered its own momentum as he then felt shame about his own reactions of jealousy, anger, and shame (i.e. shame about shame). As Natalie withdrew from him and he experienced her as an emotional "brick wall", he felt his attempts at communication of his feelings were unwelcome—and again his response was shame. An associated experience was his perception of Natalie as a "stranger" when her infidelities became apparent; at such times he felt he did not know how to relate to her—he felt he did not know her and felt awkward, as one might with a stranger. During periods of loving intimacy with Natalie, Pedro would experience a joyful sense of being special to her, of being her "chosen one" and he would bask in the warmth of her affection. Then each time one of her infidelities became apparent, Pedro would feel violently ejected from his place of intimacy with her— thrown into a profoundly painful place of exclusion and shame— and would feel that he was the stranger, looking on with anguished envy at the union of his beloved with an other. In turn, Natalie would feel shamefully exposed whenever her sexual adventures and affairs came to light. As each struggled with their particular forms of shame, they found the only relief lay in communication, whereby they could again and again re-find their empathy for one another. They found that the cure for shame is empathy.

Some of Natalie's shame was to do with feeling violated. Pedro's was associated with feeling excluded or rejected, and ejected from his place of feeling "special" and "chosen". Both of them experienced shame about certain feelings and behaviours being exposed to the anticipated disapproval of the other. What do these various forms of shame have in common? They are all to do with vulnerability in the expression of emotional need in relation to the other person. In each instance the bond of empathy is breached— the experience is of falling out of attunement and into a place of affective loneliness. The experience of subject relating to subject is lost, perhaps abruptly and with emotional violence. In its place is the sense of being dismissed as a subject and of becoming an object to the other.

The positive function of the lie

As Natalie revealed more about her way of being and relating, it became apparent that in many ways she had tended to structure her life around lies and deception. Despite her clear wish to be truthful, and her professed valuing of honesty, she was in certain respects a compulsive liar. Although lies and lying have, in general, highly negative connotations, being seen as forms of manic manipulation and exploitation of others, it was possible to discern a more benign meaning in Natalie's case. For her, the capacity to lie was an expression of her autonomy and privacy. Having experienced her mother as so invasive and controlling, the discovery that it was possible to lie and conceal truth from her mother was of vital significance. It was an affirmation of her separateness from her mother and an indication of her own sense of agency. If she could lie successfully, it must mean that she had a private core self—wherein she could discover her own hidden desire, fantasy, and direction. In her lies, Natalie would feel triumphant, celebrating her secret freedom. Conversely, when her lies were exposed she would feel shame, her inner privacy violated; she would feel deflated and depressed. However, Natalie's lies also caused her great anxiety in her adult relationships. Her wish to be able to have a relationship of honest intimacy with Pedro conflicted fundamentally with the fact that her pervasive pattern was to structure her life on lies and concealment. Each person in her life would know an aspect of her, but none would know all of her—although each would tend to feel she was presenting a truthful account of herself. She was terrified of the leakage between the compartmentalized areas of her life— although she also longed to be released from her self-imposed web of lies. The more that Natalie sought honesty in her relationship with Pedro the greater her anxiety and sense of crisis. Part of the therapeutic work was for Natalie to discover that honesty did not have to mean violation of her core self—and to realize that whilst she certainly had the capacity to lie and conceal successfully, she could choose to be truthful.

Whilst for Natalie the lie had a positive function, of affirming privacy and autonomy, its negative aspect is often more apparent. Through the lie, the child discovers his or her separateness from the mother. Whilst facilitating the child's process of separation-individuation, this also evokes a sense of being cut off from mother's love, according to the formula, "if mother finds out about my lie she will not love me". The proliferation of the lie means a continual anxiety of being "found out". Moreover, the compulsive liar also fails to be truthful to him/herself—and ultimately t...