Talk about a global village!

• Shame and empathy & 'cold' violence by Laurel Downey, 6/4/97
  
  

I'm amazed at the rapidity with which you have integrated these ideas. It took Vick Kelly and me several years to get to the level of sophistication you've achieved in a couple of weeks. And even though I've been involved in this forum since we started it the first days of 1996, I still can't get used to the fact that you can be right around the corner and at the other side of the planet at the same time. OK. Affect Theory.

1) In the chapter on the empathic wall found in Shame and Pride, and in the original article on it published in 1986 (Psychoanalytic Study of the Child), I suggested that the empathic wall was not a palpable and discrete entity but a metaphor for a wide range of systems through which each of us learns to shield ourself from the affect broadcast by the other person. One way we do this, of course, is by the conscious refusal to allow facial mimickry of the affect displayed by the other. Other methods include the decision to think about something else, and to focus attention on some completely different source of affect (whether from memory, imagination, or another stimulus available in the present scene). We can turn away in shame, view the broadcasting other with contempt (a fusion of dissmell and anger) or disgust, recite a favorite poem; lots of strategies are available to allow us to fight off the experience of affective resonance.

When these mechanisms are available to us on a voluntary basis, it may be said that we are relatively safe in the presence of the affect of others. When we have little ability to maintain an empathic wall, we are in danger of being taken over against our will or better judgement. When we have been brought up in a toxic environment that makes us far too walled off from the affect of others, then the empathic wall is pathologically strong. When biological illness prevents us from resonating (biological dysphoria="depression," moderate to serious medical illness that makes us unable to come out of our own preoccupation to feel in contact with others, etc.) we are isolated from others by another type of pathological empathic wall. You are quite right to note that the ability of a child to resonate with the affect broadcast by others may be bound by shame and made nearly impossible.

I've written a largish article on these matters that will appear in the 1997 issue of "The Annual of Psychoanalysis," a special issue devoted to the memory of my great mentor and friend, Michael Franz Basch. In this article I merge the work of Vick Kelly with that of the Wagga Wagga group to show that it is the management of the empathic wall which determines both the capacity for empathy and the ability to be a member of a community.

2) I've got one of those cruel husband situations in my practice right now, and it seems clear that he mounts a campaign of attack by contempt, humiliation, degredation, financial attrition, and other types of meanness only at times when he has felt out of control for reasons that may have little or nothing to do with his wife. I view this as part of the attack other script library because the shaming attacks are mounted in order for him to feel stronger and more competent when he feels least so for other reasons.

3) As for empathy vs. sympathy, I view the former as a system (group of scripts) for the management of the affects broadcast by others, scripts that allow the development of mature intimacy. I see sympathy as a quite different group of scripts learned to handle the effect on us of negative affect experienced by others; usually it involves an ideological script central to the identity of the one who therefore is seen as altruistic, while often (not always) it functions in a way that prevents the sympathetic one from experiencing affective resonance with the pained other. In no way do I feel that either is innate or necessary for success in life.

4) If you will drop me a line at nathanson@tomkins.org, I will get you the e-mail address for Michael Fox, the bookseller who has been so kind as to distribute our books all over the world. I suspect Michael can find a way to get you a copy of "Knowing Feeling: Affect, Script, and Psychotherapy" at a price much more felicitous than what is available through regular channels. He can also supply copies of the Tomkins "Affect Imagery Consciousness" series as well as a whole host of books related to our work.

5) Should you have a moment, I think all of us would be interested in learning more about your work and training. Visiting in person is a bit more difficult.

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