Interview with Sally R. Munt

ABSTRACT

Sally R. Munt is best known for her work on shame, especially her book Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame, published in 2007. Noticing that shame is a particularly relational affect Munt’s work focuses in on and explores the politics of shame. What happens when we refuse to acknowledge shame’s role in the production and creation of political subjects? Can bypassed shame be found at the root of fascist political movements? Might shame be used as a tool to further emancipatory political projects? Given our historical moment, these questions feel especially timely and their exploration existentially essential. That is what is why we are delighted that Sally Munt agreed to a dialogue in the form of an interview with the editors of this issue, Daniel Goldin and Allison Merrick. What follows is their e-mail exchanges.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• bypassed shame
• politics of shame

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See further Gulati, Rajiv & Pauley. 2019. “The Half Embrace of Psychic Bisexuality” in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Vol 67, Issue 1, pp. 97–121, who discuss the edited collection Psychic Bisexuality edited by Perelberg (2018), which was produced by a group of prominent French and British analysists.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sally R. Munt

Sally R. Munt, Ph.D., is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Politics at the University of Sussex, UK. She is Chief Editor of Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, and a Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist in private practice.

Allison Merrick

Allison Merrick, Ph.D., Psy.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, San Marcos, and a trained Research Psychoanalyst with a clinical private practice. Merrick’s research focuses in on how moral values shape self-understanding, particularly how those values can empower and enliven or constrain and deaden us. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Psychoanalysis: Self and Context, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and elsewhere.

Daniel Goldin

Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D., currently serves as editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He has published numerous articles and co-hosts the podcast The Conversation with Daniel Posner. Daniel’s book Storying in Psychoanalysis and the Everyday World will be published by Routledge early next year. Daniel is a training and supervising analyst affiliated with the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in California.