The Origin of Shame in Early Life

ABSTRACT

Shame is the emotion that mediates the developing infant’s sense of synchrony with their social world. Between the ages of 1 and 2, the social world of infancy is characterized by here-and-now enactive rhythms with others, and shame comes about through ruptures in those present moment interactions. Between the ages of 3 and 5, with increasing narrative fluency through conversations, the toddler develops an ability to reflect on past actions in the company of others. They now can experience shame for actions they performed (or failed to perform) in the past that didn’t live up to the expectations of a familial community of minds. We understand both the purely enactive and the reflective versions of shame as operating on a continuum. On one end, shame functions as a signal to repair misalliances. On the other, shame can become a totalizing experience of isolation and self-consciousness. We use these ideas to explore, in novel ways, certain psychoanalytic phenomena such as dissociation, narcissism, PTSD and body-dysmorphia.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-reflective shame
• enactive phenomenology
• participatory belonging
• reflective shame
• body narrative capacities
• totalizing shame
• body dysmorphia

Introduction

The story of the fall of man is the primal story of shame in Western culture, the moment when the first human pair sought to hide and cover themselves. It is instructive that this primal moment of shame followed an experience of insight. Once we have eaten from the tree of knowledge, the story warns, we find ourselves naked, exposed, subject to the gaze of the other and to our own potentially critical gaze. We become self-conscious, alienated from ourselves. Paradise requires a veil of ignorance. Knowledge and shame in this telling have to do with the subject becoming also an object. A split which the old testament sees as a fall from grace, ushering in a totalizing shame that cannot be removed, that sinks in and feels to be at the center of our being.

This paper will consider a different origin story for shame, one which looks for sources not in our mythic history but in infant interactions with important caregivers and companions from birth to age 5. In agreement with the biblical story, we see shame as inevitable. However, in distinction to the biblical story, we do not see shame as the horrific “after” in a before/after scenario – as a fall from grace. Rather, we see it as an emotion at the heart of being a social creature that can either signal disconnection and a need to repair or, on the other end of the spectrum, generate an experience of disintegration, where world and time disappear into a black hole of total self-consciousness. Shame hovers as a possibility over all our affairs from birth on. But it runs along a continuum.

We find common ground with the bible story in a belief that a different sort of shame becomes possible with a certain kind of knowledge, when we make a shift in infancy from a purely enactive mode of being with others – where connection is mediated directly by gaze, gesture and expression – to a mode enabled by language and narrative competence, which allows for mental time travel and that remarkable human ability to see oneself in the past as though through the eyes of others. Reflective shame is also an emotion of disconnection, although the disconnection is not between two people in the here-and-now, but between a self in the present and a self in the past who failed to live up to the expectations of others or to its own ideals. After the infant becomes a narrative initiate, they cease to live solely in what the philosopher-psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs’ (2002) terms, “the pure and timeless ‘becoming’ of the lived body.” As in the story of the Fall, the infant gains entry into the human family as a unique protagonist with a long past and a long trajectory, but they also become more aware of themselves as potentially unworthy, subject to insult and decay and isolation in ways less easily repaired in the moment.

The myth of Adam and Eve is a western prototype that conceives of shame as a sudden violent split between the self as subject and the self as object. The view from infant research suggests that the occurrence of shame pre-dates this split, and also that “split” may be too harsh a word in average circumstances, as the child’s capacity to see themselves as simultaneously in the now and the then occurs gradually over time through conversations with parents and companions about the storied reasons for situations and states of mind, stories that at some point break the barrier of the present moment and enable a child to join their parents in contemplating themselves in the past, during a segment of time that is no longer. Shame is the emotion that emerges from this break when the reminiscence is harsh, critical and disconnecting (“You fought with your sister that whole car-ride).” Pride is the emotion when the reminiscence is glowing, approving and integrative (“You played so quietly in the car with your sister”). In a minor form, shame can regulate social interaction – providing a flash of separation that offers creative possibilities for the developing social self. In its major/pathological form, shame is a black hole that sucks up everything.

The purpose of this paper is first to explore shame in its earliest manifestations from birth to two years, when a purely enactive mode of intercourse with the world predominates, and then to explore a self-reflective form of shame that comes with talk between the ages of 2 and 5, when narrative imagination supplements action and interaction. We propose that shame in both its manifestations takes shape along a continuum. Finally, we will describe the sources of some pathological, totalizing shame experiences.

Shame in the exclusively enactive dimension (birth to apx. 2)

The human condition is marked by a peculiar ambiguity. We both are a body and have a body. Early infancy is characterized primarily by the beingness of the body, what Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls “the subjective body” or the “lived body.” Thomas Fuchs (2018) defines it this way:

My subjective body is … not the physical body that I see, touch, or sense; rather, it is my capacity to see, touch, and sense. It is not an object in the world, but the medium, the field, or the capacity that reveals the world to me. As “habitual body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 71), it contains the preliminary drafts of our enactments of life and thus conveys the founding experience of “I can.” (Husserl 1989, p. 266)

Two aspects of the human infant are present even in the womb. The first is “the founding experience of ‘I can.’” The child knows himself from the beginning as a “center of initiative,” to use Kohut’s formulation. He experiments with his movements to make things happen. The second aspect we might describe as a sympathetic drive to attain affinity with important others. Trevarthen and Delafield-Butt (2015) helps us out:

Movies made by ultra-sound, which enable [us to see] the foetus alive in the mother’s body and to measure its activities, confirm that from mid gestation limb movements of the foetus are purposefully guided, anticipating sensory feedback, and experimenting with it. These self-regulating movements … also reveal a special sensibility for the presence of an “other,” reaching and touching with special care toward a twin. (p. 4)

Broucek (1991), an early theorizer of shame in infancy, quotes Papousek and Papousek (1975) describing the following experiment.

The four-month-old infants taking part in this experiment had to find out by themselves, at first by chance, that a head rotation of at least 30 degrees to a predetermined side would switch on 5 seconds of multicoloured stimulation from a blinking light. Before the experiments began, the light stimulation itself, regardless of the infants activity at the time, proved to be an attractive source of stimulation and generated distinct orienting reactions. After it had been repeated several times, orientation decreased, a reaction which is typical of habituation. But during experimental sessions, as soon as the infant had discovered that light presentation was contingent on his own head movements, his behavior changed dramatically. Orientation reactions increased in intensity, and the infant continuously made all possible types of movements to try to switch on the visual stimulation again. If successful, he repeated his feat so many times and with such joyful affect in his gestures and vocalization that it seemed more like attachment than habituation. (pp. 251–252)

One way of understanding this delight in contingency is that the infant in those moments where action becomes interaction discovers their own will, “I can make things happen.” But these are four month old prereflective infants. Another, perhaps more accurate understanding is that they discover ways of effectuating a flow with things outside themselves and within themselves in which they participate and the world and their body participates. They are in the flow of life, making and receiving meaning.

Broucek further notes:

The infants in these studies also exhibited a negative affect state associated with the inability to influence, predict, or compound an event they expected, on the basis of previous experience, to be able to control or understand. (p. 252)

Broucek sees this as a quasi-shame experience on the part of the infant, perhaps the very prototype of shame. For Broucek, the infant’s affective response to failure suggests that shame in the purely enactive mode of early infancy comes with a loss of self-efficacy. However, there may be more to the story. Broucek himself speculates that these lights that the infant “turned on” might have been perceived by the infant as quasi-human presences. Certainly the infant’s prior experiences with reactions contingent on their actions happened in the course of intersubjective exchanges with a parent, an affective dance of expressions on faces looking at each other. An infant’s relationship with objects probably evolves generally out of their first relationship with humans, rather than vice versa, hence the animistic character of an older child’s relations with “transitional objects” such as a Teddy bear or a blanket. In short, the infant’s first shame experience is when their sense of “I can” unexpectedly fails. But this “I can” is a relational “I can,” a loss of agency in the interpersonal arena, as in I can’t make you smile again, I can’t make you turn on, I can’t get you to comfort me, I can’t bring us back into the call and response that is the flow of human companionship.

We now appreciate that the infant comes into the world as a “doer-doing” with others (Lichtenberg et al., 2016). Along with their need for attachment and safety, infants bring an innate motive need for belonging (Trevarthen, 2021) – and a pre-reflective awareness of their success at holding up their end of the bargain, i.e. coordinating shared intentions. Infants are aesthetically and – in Trevarthen’s view – morally attuned to the effect of their provocations on the other as a companion or caregiver. In contemporary relational terms, they are always already invested in sustaining interpersonal interaction – what Benjamin (2002) calls the “rhythmic third” – during even the earliest dance of relationship. Their very sense of worth is bound up with it. They feel shame when it falls apart. Shame is a self-and-other emotion (Zahavi, 2014) that signals a painful vulnerability and isolation – exposing us to ourselves as the profoundly dependent social creatures we are. It emerges when the infant falls out of a state of participatory belonging with others.

Tronick’s famous still-face experiment provides a dramatic example of this falling out of participatory belonging. In this experiment, a 7 month old baby bills and coos with a parent who, by experimental design, grows suddenly expressionless and frozen. At first, the baby tries to “revive” the parent with a variety of ploys and pleas but eventually withdraws and orients themselves away from the parent in a hopeless limp manner. Suddenly the infant is a mere floundering body, meaningless in itself, an object suffused with shame.

Trevarthen (2021) describes an experiment that elicits the shame experience even more directly. Emma at 6 months hides her face when a kind stranger on the other side of a video screen doesn’t “get” that she wants to play “clap handies,” a game she frequently plays with her parents and was playing with her mother in the first sequence of the experiment. In that moment of rupture, Emma experiences herself as unable to make meaning in a new human world, of being incapable and worthless as a companion. Sympathetic minds can fall away. Communion is fragile.

At around 6 months, infants begin to show a shame response when exposed to the gaze of strangers. This response runs the gamut between coy flirtations and collapse. One of the reasons infants experience stranger anxiety at around 6 months is that by this time they have developed a shared code, a set of common rhythms with parents, such that its absence provokes a feeling of meaninglessness that brings about a collapse of the lived body: the feeling is “I can’t be in front of this person.” The infant “fall[s] out of interpersonal relations for the moment and experiences an elementary self-devaluation.” (Fuchs, 2002).

These are dramatic examples that describe extreme states of shame. But most shame experiences in early infancy are not so extreme. Shame starts out as a signal to the infant that they have fallen out of interpersonal rhythm and need to try to restore it. The infant’s shame reaction – blushing, averted gaze, and loss of posture – also functions as a signal to the adult to renew efforts toward reconnection or modify their responses. Shame dissipates as the child does their part to restore connection and a parent meets them from the other side. “I can’t” is replaced by “I can.” The mother unfreezes her gaze at the end of the still-face experiment and a familiar interpersonal rhythm is restored for both of them. The stranger smiles and the infant smiles back. But when the infant experiences outright physical abuse or trauma or neglect or is left with a hostile stranger, when there is no restoration of the to-and-fro between child and other, then shame can become a totalizing experience. After the infant experiences repetitive failures to sustain participatory belonging, shame may move from a signal to an abiding feeling of being contemptible for the very need to belong.

Shame and the enactive self supplemented by narrative capacities

Between the ages of 2 and 5, the human infant develops supplemental narrative abilities that drastically extend their sense of self in a world of others and changes the nature of the shame experience. We have discussed the purely enactive self as formed through experiences of “participatory belonging” in here-and-now interchanges with others. Through narrative practices, the older infant learns to participate in the human world across a wider and wider swath of time. The infant’s conscious attention is no longer simply confined to the horizons of a present-moment interaction but is able to consider segments of the past and expand upon them in conversation with others. This extension of time becomes available to them through what Hutto (2008) and others call a narrative practice.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to do more than briefly trace the developmental steps that lead to this narratively organized extension of self through time (See Hutto, 2008, pp. 199–247, for a more extensive account), but here is an abbreviated timeline.

Infants before the age of 2 draw unconsciously from implicit memories of being-with and doing-with that constitutes a kind of interactive know-how (Lyons-Ruth et al. 1998). They also have a pre-reflective feel for the past and the future within the bounds of here-and-now interactions, whose storyline – what Daniel Stern calls a proto-narrative envelope – extends backward to what we just did and forward to what we will do next (in order, say, to keep a game of clap hands going). The preverbal infant exists in implicit or “lived time,” a time internally structured around synchronous action and interaction with caregivers and companions. But preverbal infants have as yet no ability to contemplate a segmented period of the past disconnected from the present moment and from what we are doing together now.

At around 9 months, something amazing happens At around this time, infants join with parents in acts of joint attention (see Tomasello, 2015, for an extended account), which seems to be a necessary precursor to full language-based time-travel of the sort that allows a person to see themselves in the past as though from a third-person perspective within the unique temporal sequencing of a story. When infants begin to jointly attend with others, they are required to attend to objects in coordination with another person’s attention. “‘Gaze monitoring,’ ‘checking back,’ and other social referencing techniques are then used to ensure that the communicative triangle has been established and that it is maintained” (Hutto, 2008, p. 126). This coordination of gaze to objects makes objects meaningful in a new way. They become relational, humanized objects (Goldin, in press). It is easy to see how a new kind of shame experience might come into play when such a fragile sharing of attention fails to take hold or sustain itself. The child might feel at such a moment a loss which, if it could be put into language, would go something like this: “I can’t stay in the same world as my mother.”

But a larger shift in the shame experience comes with conversational abilities that follow quickly, with language, on the heels of joint attention. The newly verbal child coordinates attention not solely through pointing and gaze but by using conventionalized verbal symbols. Much of this word-based coordinating of attention takes shape in here-and-now verbally organized performances with others that only gradually take on an explicit narrative format. Gallagher (2020) describes a child’s early initiation into narrative practices through performance and pretend.

The child’s first attempts at narrating typically “occur in action, in episodes of symbolic play … In pretend play, the plot thickens in the action of the play, in what the child is doing in pretense; the language that goes along with the play process is not narrative itself, but is performative vocalization. Here’s an example from Gallagher and Hutto (in press). The mother takes the toy car, for example, and says “Zoom, zoom, zoom.” She is not narrating the car; she is driving it in pretend play. The child then takes a turn. The vocalization, and gradually, the words, become part of the narrative that captures the pretend action. The mother says, “The car goes zoom.” She is now initiating a narrative about the car. Later she says, addressing the child, “You played so nicely with the car this afternoon, didn’t you?” The mother is leading the child into a kind of narrative. Later the child says, “Car goes zoom. I play with car.” The child is beginning to narrate his action. (p. 161)

One common way parents bring their children more deeply into a narrative practice is by helping them with intense feelings. Here is a little snippet of dialogue – and explication (Goldin, in press) – between a mother and a toddler provided by the developmentalist Fivush and Haden (2013):

M: What happened to your finger?

C: I pinched it.

M: You pinched it. Oh boy, I bet that made you real sad.

C: Yeah … it hurts.

M: Yeah, it did hurt. A pinched finger is no fun … But who came and made you feel better?

C: Daddy!

Note how the mother changes the tense of the child’s “It hurts” to “Yeah, it did hurt,” bringing the child with her into the past where they both “remember” together and make their hearts beat at the same time. The child feels better after this exchange, certainly, but he is also left with a new ability. He is able to reverse the flow of time by creating a story with his parents.

This sequence seems at first glance very different from sequences we have described between preverbal infants and mothers. But is it really so very different? In all these examples, Mother and child are trying to sustain an experience they both shape. The difference is that the conversational experience takes place in the conjoined imaginations of mother and infant about the past as much as in the here-and-now. Narratives during late toddlerhood do not take shape within a child’s solitary mind. They are enacted through conversations with others. The child does not have a narrative, he does narrative with others, most often with parents, a practice best characterized as an “experience about experience.” If early infancy is marked by pre-verbal/implicit relating, childhood marks the beginning of more reflective ways of being in company with others. The child is now able to engage actively in conversations with people close to them about experiences in their lifeworld.

Between 3 and 5, children become fully immersed in a world of stories, myths from the culture as well as everyday stories about themselves and the people in their world. Hutto proposes that a kind of ongoing cognitive friction soon takes place between child and conversational partners. We see a benevolent version of this friction of perspectives in the little exchange above, where a child’s experience of current pain meets their mother’s more optimistic perspective of a father that comforted the child in the immediate past. These conflicts of perspectives, some more threatening than the above example, becomes a salient problem to solve and presses the child to develop a capacity for meta-representation. The child learns to represent how others represent things. It is just a step away for the child to begin to reason about their own history and ways their own perspective at an earlier time differed from their perspective now.

A new kind of shameful disconnection becomes possible – a disconnection between the child’s self in the present and the child’s self in the past. The child can now feel shame for not having lived up to a parent’s expectations, which may later morph into shame for not having lived up to their own ideals. These moments of shame on the narrative level indicate the thwarting or falling away of a different mode of “I can.” “I was unable to keep a connection going with a loved other” becomes “I was unable in the past to keep a connection going with how I want to be seen right now.” I failed to live up to the expectations of others or to my own expectations for myself.

Most of the time, shame operates as a subtle signal on the narrative dimension, just as it does most of the time on the purely enactive dimension, pressing for a kind of after-the-fact repair by coming to terms with the reasons for the failure to maintain good contact between the two selves, reasons that inevitably expand into an explanatory story. What got in the way of this “I can?” What happened when I was unable to act according to the expectations of others or to my “ideals?” What was the larger story behind a moment of inaction or regretted action? How can we “stand in the spaces” between the two self-states by using our narrative imagination to traverse the distance and bring the two back into contact? This does not mean necessarily putting together a complete story but rather involves reflecting on our movements through the world through the lens of narrative, in other words understanding our moods and emotions by simultaneously understanding the circumstances through which they emerged.

As adults, we are able to experience shame while alone, as we dwell in memory on situations which show us a version of ourselves we don’t like. This possibility puts a thin penumbra of anxiety around all our here-and-now actions and decisions. After being initiated into a narrative practice, everything we do is now potential material for a story, which may or may not cause us to feel ashamed.

Totalizing shame

It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an adequate account of shame in its totalizing forms, as we are mostly concerned with how shame appears and reappears on a good enough developmental trajectory. However, in the following section we will touch ever so briefly on several ways shame as a totalizing experience shows up in our work with patients.

Falling out of time

We have looked at how the preverbal infant exists in implicit time, a time unconsciously structured around “synchronous action and interaction with caregivers and companions.” The preverbal infant mostly experiences breaks in synchrony as a signal to repair their being-in-time with an important other. However, in massive disruptions to infant-mother synchrony, such as in the Still-face experiment, the temporal horizon of the subjective self-with-other constricts to the eternal pin-point of the present moment. The child falls out of time when they fall out of sync.

The verbal child organizes time explicitly through narrative as well as implicitly through the rhythms of the here-and-now. They grow adept at the past and future tense. They refer to yesterday, today and tomorrow. The child soon has a life to manage even as they mostly confine attention to an immediate situation, and their sense of what they did or didn’t do in the past that contradicted the expectations of their home is experienced also as a falling out of synchrony. A self in the past becomes divided from a self in the present. Let’s imagine for a second that the mother who helpfully reminisced with her child about their jammed finger instead simply blurted, “It’s your fault for being clumsy, stop your crying!” We can think of such a mother as presenting a kind of narrative still-face, shutting down the child’s hope for connection through a refusal to bring her imagination into alliance with her child’s imagination, just as the still-face mother refused to respond to her preverbal child’s gestures and cries. But with the verbal child, the lost connection is in two dimensions, between mother and child in the present moment, and between the child in the moment and the child who got hurt in the past. This has a similar effect of freezing time and leaving the child out of continuity with themselves and out of sync with the world.

Two forms of dissociation

I (DG) have written elsewhere that:

… the word “dissociation” comes from the Latin “dis-sociare,”’ meaning literally “to unjoin from a person or to lose companionship with another.” It is interesting to consider that the modern, psychological meaning of “dissociation,” which has to do with a splitting off of parts of an experience from awareness, comes by metaphorical extension from the breaking of a real human bond, a de-companioning of people. (Goldin, 2014, p. 251)

Totalizing shame experienced by the preverbal infant is almost by definition dissociative, in that it brings the infant out of synchronized companionship with a needed other. We call this falling out of time in the here-and-now process dissociation to distinguish it from structural dissociation or self-state dissociation, which becomes possible only when the child becomes a narrative initiate.

Relational authors frequently speak of patients entering into multiple “dissociated” self-states that cannot be known to one another. This structural dissociation is related to process dissociation in that a person who slips out of time and human connection in the moment is likely to lose access to that state later on, but it is a pathological phenomenon only when it becomes possible for a person explicitly to recall other earlier experiences, an ability that comes with narrative practice and conversation and whose failure brings the sufferer even further out of the human family. Mitchell (1993) describes how relational psychoanalysis has conceptualized the self along temporal, rather than spatial lines, a revision which brought out a different way of thinking about unconscious processes. It is not that one agency of the mind suppresses another agency of the mind, as Freud sometimes argued, but that a self in the present loses contact with a self in the past. Rather than repressing some specific content or feeling, a self in the present simply loses or loosens its identification with a self in the past who did not act according to present expectations or ideals, creating a division between a self that can be known and a self that becomes something of an empty set. We believe it is not anxiety, as Sullivan argued, but intense, overwhelming shame that gets in the way of contact between self states in separate temporal realms. Children growing up in environments where breaks in synchrony are a constant occurrence or poorly repaired, either on the enactive dimension or the narrative dimension of experience, are likely to become over-sensitized to shame and particularly prone to dissociate on the process level as well as the structural level. For such children, time is out of joint.

Narcissism

We don’t begin life in a state of primary narcissism, as Freud and most of our psychoanalytic forefathers believed. In early infancy, we have no way to look at ourselves as imagined from the outside in. We are purely enactive beings. Narcissistic grandiosity and fantasy is only possible when the child becomes an initiate in narrative practices, when the difference between the self in the present and the self in the past enables ornamentation and pretend. The child now has an image he can curate and is frequently tempted to embark on a double life. The child can dissemble. Lying or disavowing as a defense against shame is always an option for any verbal child, but in good enough social worlds, the child can learn to negotiate shameful states before these become split off and habitually dissociated. The narcissistic defense against shame produces a personality that is organized around denying the need for participatory belonging – marked by pseudo-autonomy and a reluctance to recognize shame even as a signal. The split between a self in the moment and a self in the past, becomes an absolute split, and the self in the past becomes a mere curated image, rather than a protagonist who can be understood and whose actions can be explained by taking into account the history and circumstances from which they emerged. However, in good enough development, the self in the past and the self in the present can be kept in correspondence through narratively organized conversations that integrate the two, narratives that take place on “the dual landscape of thought and action” (Bruner, 1986). And it is possible, although difficult, to integrate the two selves later in life through that experience about experience we call psychotherapy.

Post-traumatic stress and shame

A violent attack, rape or sudden accident is quite obviously massively disconnecting on an enactive here-and-now level at the time of the happening. Here shame overwhelms at the onset. But such events also cause massive disconnection of self from self on the narrative dimension, as the experience of traumatic stress – almost by definition – is one of helplessness in the face of threat, destructive of one’s treasured sense of agency. The worst traumas are those inflicted on a child by a parent, creating what attachment researchers call “fright without solution” (Hesse and Main, 2006), where the perpetrator is the very person one counts on for protection. Needless to say, shame here operates on both the enactive dimension of self and on the retrospective dimension, as such a parent is unlikely to offer a way back to being in sync through narratively organized conversation.

Treatment often involves operating on either or both aspects of self. Van der Kolk’s (2015) drama therapy and Pat Ogden’s (2015) sensorimotor psychotherapy are ways to bring back “action potentials” thwarted at the time of the trauma, restoring the “founding experience of ‘I can.’” More traditional talk therapies offer the victim an opportunity to put together reasons for the failure to act in the form of stories on the narrative plane, an experience about experience which in and of itself can be helpful in restoring a sense of participatory belonging.

Body dysmorphia: Culture and shame

Body dysmorphia is a shame disorder that we believe has sources in our image-obsessed culture as well as in early development. Fuchs describes the phenomenon in this way:

Thus body dysmorphic disorder is closely connected to shame: it is characterized by overvalued fears of an assumed bodily ugliness or mishap mainly related to the face as the locus of shame expression. The patients complain of a huge nose, of the form of the mouth or other parts, excessive hair in the face, swelling or reddening of the complexion, etc. Intensive shamefulness, fear of visual exposure and feelings of being constantly observed, stared or laughed at by others may culminate in paranoid ideas of reference. (p. 235, 2003) … the body part concerned stands out as particularized and bulky, as a constant object of attention; it seems to be the focus of all gazes and renders spontaneous bodily performance impossible. The lived body becomes conscious as corporeal body; and with it, the patient’s thinking is “reflected,” introverted, and constantly revolves around the body and the self … The “body-for-others” now dominates the lived-body and leads to sociophobic avoidance.

Someone who struggles with body dysmorphia might have had trouble in their early infancy finding a rhythm with others. Being in rhythm and coordinating intentions with another no doubt creates a feeling of joy and gracefulness, of one’s body being beautiful in its movements. Falling out of rhythm with another leaves one feeling ugly in one’s movements with others, ungraceful, perhaps even – dis-graceful. Later, this feeling of being ugly and out of sync would no doubt extend to equally disgraceful conversations about experiences in the past.

But we wonder if there are not top-down influences from the culture as well. Much of the imagery of our current media landscape presents a “view from nowhere,” pictures, words and videos produced by real people but radically displaced from their human sources and disseminated indifferently through time and space. Fuchs speaks of how those who struggle with body dysmorphia experience their seeming physical defects as the “focus of all gazes.” The gaze for such people is a panoptic gaze, like the gaze from an obscured guard tower, anonymous and abstract but always accurate in its cruel discernment of fault.

Shame is often mediated by the gaze, especially by the gaze of an objectifying other. The actual gaze of those who “look after” us in childhood becomes through narrative practice the metaphorical gaze of “how we are seen” by a community of minds, in the sense of an attitude or judgment that can be quite distant and removed. In good-enough circumstances, the actual gaze of a parent is a theme-and-variation kind of gaze, with a general tenor but a great deal of variety. In bad circumstances, that gaze can become fixed in cold appraisal or condemnation. When, through increasing narrative proficiency, the child internalizes and transforms the parental gaze into an imaginary gaze looking down on them, there is a danger this new internalized gaze can likewise become fixed, reified, leaving the child to feel as though they are a static image in unchanging eyes, looked down upon by God or frozen as a view from nowhere. This is especially true of children whose parents repetitively fail to heed their shame signals early on or fail to initiate them into a good-enough narrative practice through conversation. Implicit ideas from our culture might conspire with vulnerabilities from early childhood to induce a feeling of being seen always in the same way, of being irredeemably defective, an image that points only to itself. We believe this is frequently the situation with body dysmorphia.

Conclusion

Ideally a parent attends to moments of synchrony and dyssynchrony in caring for a non-verbal infant, noting the infant’s corresponding expressions of pride and shame with the purpose of sustaining a sense of participatory belonging through mutually shaped rhythms. Ideally the parent reminiscing with an older verbal infant generates a good cognitive friction that allows the child’s collaboratively remembered experiences to change and reach toward the future, rather then becoming fixed. Such a parent sustains attuned interaction with their child not only in the here-and-now of gaze and gesture and touch but also in their conjoined imaginations about situations in the past, coming together in mind as well as in the here-and-now. This also requires attention to synchrony and dyssynchrony. We have noted that Bruner famously describes narrative as operating on the “dual landscape of thought and action.” This is as much as to say that we can put together stories that at once describe a self that can be appraised as though by another and a self that can be understood as though from its own perspective. The best narratively organized conversations do this double duty.

For the infant, shame comes about when the infant falls out of coordination with a person or people, either by failing to stay in rhythm with another in the present or (between 3 and 5) by failing to live up to the expectations of others in the past. Both situations leave the infant feeling alone and outside of time. In both situations, shame usually serves as a signal to try to restore coordination, and it usually dissipates through new verbal and/or nonverbal interactions. But with extreme, unrepaired or repetitive interpersonal ruptures, shame can become an enduring experience, experienced as permanent exile rather than as a signal.

We will close with a very short vignette that describes an exchange between an adult and a child that promoted a feeling of prideful synchrony and interpersonal flow in the child, an interaction that operated on the non-verbal dimension at the same time that it framed the child’s movements narratively through words.

Vignette

I (DG) tend to ruminate on papers when I swim laps in a public pool in the morning. The other day, while swimming I overheard a coach talking to an elementary school child practicing the crawl in the lane parallel to mine. I was only able to hear the coach’s voice: “That was much better!” she said. And then after a pause, “Did you feel more control over your body? It looked that way.”

I was struck by how perfectly the coach brought in an outside, objective view of the child’s self while at the same time entering into the child’s subjective view in her implicit narrative of the child’s improving technique – attempting to bridge the gap with that wonderful line, “Did you feel more control over your body? It looked that way.” This conversation itself was enactive, the coach’s voice rising and falling with excitement, no doubt supplemented by gestures and movement, and the child listening through the sound of water splashing around him. It is interesting that the very project the two were involved in was one of helping the other come into better dynamic interaction with their environment – the gain of which we associate with pride, and the loss of which we associate with shame.

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Notes on contributors

Daniel Goldin

Daniel Goldin, 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.

Daniel S. Posner

Daniel S. Posner, M.D., is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital System in New York City where he teaches and supervises residents in psychodynamic psychotherapy. He is an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and has published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. He maintains a private practice in Manhattan.