Shame’s Value

ABSTRACT

Shame we are told is as intense as it is unrelenting. Shame we are told, further still, is as contagious as it is transmittable. By fastidiously attending to clinical reports and theoretical depictions of shame’s totalizing character, I argue in this paper that we can notice something that has broadly gone unnoticed: shame assumes for itself absolute value. To bear this out, I contrast my view with that of the dominant one: that shame has an instrumental value. I show some limitations of the dominant view by reflecting on the role of shame in psychoanalytic training. The picture that emerges may seem quaintly commonsensical, and even commonplace, but it has, I think, vast clinical implications. I believe that it certainly has the potential to open some new horizons. The arguments for such a bold claim will occupy the concluding section of my paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• value
• moral emotions
• affect theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ At the risk of mixing our fairytales somewhat, Charles Rycroft in A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis calls shame the “Cinderella of the unpleasant emotions,” whereas, and as if to prove the point, Laplanche and Pontalis’ The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973) does not include an entry on this affect (Rycroft, 1968, p. 169).

² Indeed, one commentator has noted that “post-Freudians have written more about Freud’s relationship to shame than Freud wrote on shame altogether” (Cluff, 2017, p. 3).

³ It is worth noting, I think, that Philip Bromberg tells us that his own “dissociation is most frequently a response to shame” (Bromberg, 2006, p. 447).

⁴ I will argue that shame claims for itself an all-encompassing, totally engrossing vantage point, and thereby assumes for itself universal value. To be clear, I am not suggesting that shame should have universal value, nor am I suggesting, as so many have, that it is a universal human emotion (Ekman, 1999; Nathanson, 1997; Tomkins, 1963). Rather, I am solely interested in the ways that shame, as Richard Chefetz has it, “conjures negative assessments of a person’s intrinsic value” and the philosophical and clinical implications of such a global assessment (Chefetz, 2022, p. 63).

⁵ Here too one might worry about whether shame is the object of inquiry, rather than, say, disappointment (Maduro, 2017).

⁶ Jacobs is not alone in thinking that the value of shame is to be found in the ways it engenders self-reform. In In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion, Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni write that, in the experience of shame, “the subject is painfully revealed to herself as having an incapacity that she now has strong motivation to remedy” (Deonna et al., 2012, p. 177). As such, they continue, “the motivation to self-reform is, then, likely to be among the long-term action tendencies associated with the experience of shame” (Deonna et al., 2012, p. 178).

⁷ Several research studies conducted by June Price Tangney have reached this same conclusion, namely, that shame generates “global feelings of self-contempt and disgust” (1995, p. 1142; cf. Tangney, 1992; Tangney et al., 1996, 2011).

⁸ To wit the statement – “I feel ashamed of how I handled that case” – reflects several possible perspectives: the candidate’s perspective on himself as an object of inquiry; the candidate’s perspective on his case; and the candidate’s perspective on his colleagues. That is, the simple “I feel” places his shame in a context, in a place among a range of other possible feeling states, as well as in relationship to and in conversation with “the case.” It also harbors, at least implicitly, a longing and desire to be seen by his colleagues. This might very well introduce his colleagues as another vantage point. As the candidate longs to be seen, and shame invokes the desire to hide, the statement implies that the shame state has already passed and he is no longer in its throes.

⁹ Helen Block Lewis (1987) credits Karen Horney with this gem: “[Horney] was once asked what she thought was wrong about self-analysis. She is said to have replied that self-analysis doesn’t work because the countertransference in self-analysis is so hostile” (p. 24).

¹⁰ For more on shame’s role in suicide see Faber (1967) and Lansky (1996).

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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.