Shame links identity and social interaction

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Shame and Affect Theory by John Grohol, 2/10/96
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    • Life as interacting matrices rather than billiard balls by Don Nathanson, 12/13/98
      
      

Donald Nathanson: first of all, I want to thank you for the attention and for the book you recomended. I'm going to read it as soon as possible!! And I'm sorry taking so long to answer (it's a shame, isn't it?!!?)...I was out of town for a while and now I'm working a lot in my theses. I'm fascinated with how people try to obtain, in their living together with others, the ratification of their self-image. I think it's a very important field of research, because what we think about ourselves has to do with how we see others and with how they see us. It means that self-image, self-concept must be thought as including values, affectivity. We can't think about ourselves with 'indifference'; what we are is always positive, or negative to us. So, shame (and pride) has a central role in our lives, and a basic motivation to our action will certainly be the search for and the maintainnance of our own feeling of worth. Still at university, with a teacher of mine, I studied some behaviors involved in intimacy regulation, as self-disclosure, silent-about-oneself, to show or to hide something, to have secrets, to lie, confession...and the moral judgement ruling these behaviors. Then I started to study shame, the feeling par excellence involved in these processes: shame links identity and social interaction, as well as the way we judge ourselves and the opinion the others have about us. This idea you pointed out, about all these words for shame experience being cognates, part of the same spectrum, is great. They all are about, in some way, being aware of our visibility - vulnerability - to others. Sartre has this profound definition of shame: the feeling of being object to others' judgements. Shame, we can say, then, is directly linked with what we are (to the whole self), and as a natural consequence, is present in a great variety of situations, in a great variety of behaviors, with different names (humiliation, inferiority, etc.)...("The many faces of shame"?). Of course, if we take the usual definition of shame, besides exposure, it's something that has to do with a feeling of inferiority. But I'm not still convinced that some distintion in these related words isn't useful. For example, you can feel humiliated without feeling shame, can't you? Or feeling humiliated is feeling shame, already? I agree with you that the responses to humiliation will distribute according to their positions on the Compass of Shame. I even tried to read the enterviews I made thinking about the responses to humiliation you pointed out to me. And I was pleased to notice they where there!! It'll be great to give you some examples, but I'll do next time (promise!). Just one more thing: when talking about responses to humiliation, a great number of individuals described states of illness (including depression, mental problems and also physique illness). I found it very interesting that when asked what it's the right thing to do in a situation where the boss humiliates someone in front of his/her work colleagues (situation I presented before the enterview), these individuals organized all their action based on "I don't want to get ill" (of course I'm talking about their speech; what they said when trying to imagine themselves in the situation). I read "The mask of shame", by Léon Wurmser. I found it very dense (he uses information from a great diversity of sources). It was really useful to my research, mostly because of his descriptions, and phenomenological analysis of shame. (I don't agree with much of his psychoanalytical explanations, but even these were important to open my mind). At the moment it comes to my mind one single research where individuals were asked to define honor: it's a research with french children and adolescents (Book: "L'honneur", Série Morales, Éditions Autrement, Paris, 1991). It's really difficult to find something about honor in psychology). I'll see if I have something more. Oh...and I think we are very lucky to find out that life is REALLY complex...if wasn't so, how can we be so delighted with it?? How would we, researchers, survive??

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