Cultures and Their Discontents: On the Cultural Mediation of Shame and Guilt

Abstract

In various parts of Civilizations and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) raises the very important and interesting question of whether social, cultural, and historical contingencies may affect how the process of renunciation and the development of guilt unfolds, but then leaves the question dangling. This article argues that rather than leave Freud's anthropological question dangling, we should take it seriously by examining more closely the phenomenology of human subjectivity in other times and places. The article uses person-centered data and interviews from 1960s Tahiti and 1980s Toraja to suggest that the quality and intensity of shame and guilt in small, face-to-face communities may differ considerably from that described by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. The paper concludes by arguing that it is to Freud's focus on the experiential dimension of human life to which we should turn when examining discontentment and unhappiness from a cross-cultural point of view. When we do, we return with renewed interest and appreciation to the profound anthropological and sociological questions Freud raised but never answered in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Notes

¹Nene'na is a teknonym that means “the grandfather of.” Nene'na Limbong refers to “the grandfather of Limbong.”

²I analyze other aspects of the transference and countertransference between Nene'na Limbong and myself in other papers. See Hollan (2003) and Hollan (n.d.).

³For other efforts to understand the relation between shame, guilt, and social expression and control, see Piers and Singer (1971), Kilbourne (2008), Morrison and Lansky (2008), and Carr (1999).

⁴Much more could be said about this. Most anthropologists and other social scientists now believe that biology and the capacity for culture making and symbol using have coevolved in humans, making any clear-cut incompatibility between the two untenable.