Life as interacting matrices rather than billiard balls

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Shame and Affect Theory by John Grohol, 2/10/96
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    • Responses to public humiliation by Lia Ades, 12/8/98
      
      

You've taken on a difficult type of study. I suspect that the responses will indeed distribute according to their positions on the Compass of Shame. Some people will withdraw when humiliated, others will fear isolation from the herd and seek shelter from unempathic folk, a large number will try to escape into detour activities and thoughts, while the remainder will look around for someone else to reduce. I suspect that the easiest place for you to grab this set of concepts is my 1992 book *Shame and Pride*, which remains (Praise the Lord) easily available.

It was Leon Wurmser who said it best: all of our words for the shame experience are cognates. Shame, embarrassment, humiliation, mortification, the experience of being put down or treated with contempt. . . They differ only in the way each of us might define them on the basis of our previous life experience.

I, too, am fascinated by the concept of honor, a moral faculty astonishingly absent in those we elect to guard it and seen more as attack other behavior in our present culture. Can you point me toward any studies that have asked a wide range of individuals to define honor in their own language/personal psychology? I suspect the responses would cluster in groups not unlike the compass of shame.

The gender differences in response to shame have been in flux in our era, and I suspect you'll see a shift from shame as (attack self) deference to shame as (attack other) rage in the "modern" woman. No matter what happens when any cohort escapes from control by shame, a certain fraction of that group will misunderstand freedom as the right to be just as cruel as those who previously were their captors.

I sure hope you will keep us informed about your study, as well as your growing interest in the psychology of shame. Oh---the title of my response: Tomkins attacked generations of psychological theory when he commented that most observers tend to see affective response as part of a stimulus-response pair (Mowrer, 1938 or so). We tend to think of each and every response to each and every trigger for affect as part of a stimulus-affect-response sequence (I call them SARS for fun) that gets clustered with a host of similar SARS to make a script. Scripts are sets of rules for the management of scenes that involve intense affect, and by their nature involve not the classical billiard ball sort of dynamic interaction but complex and highly variable patterns of response dependent on scripts nested with other scripts and scenes. Life is complex and quite different from what we were taught in school, isn't it?

• Shame links identity and social interaction by Lia Ades, 1/21/99