Abstract
Gilligan points to the nexus of shame, helplessness and violence to the mind, linked to experiences of violence and helplessness in early life. While shame motivates behaviour that defends against further experience of helplessness, I argue that shame first comes into being as a psychical mechanism protecting the individual from the existential anxiety attending the loss of the capacity to think. The mind’s capacity for thought is constitutively fragile; when it is threatened so too is the coherence of the sense of self, and this provokes a deep anxiety which is unavailable to consciousness but may be discerned in the psychoanalytic setting. Philosophical analysis of the nature of shame, together with psychoanalytic object relations theory, show how shame has the defensive function of making such existential anxiety over into a form that can be represented in thought by making intelligible the underlying fear of the loss of self. The subject’s capacity for thinking is saved, at the expense of a reduced and exiguous sense of self. The shamed self thus preserves itself by misrepresenting an existential anxiety that is object-less, as a persecutory anxiety that entails existence as a dependent subjectivity, in the eyes of a shaming other.
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Notes
- 1.
I shall also leave aside any further analysis of violence; the conception of violence that I am working with is of violence as “force out of place”.
- 2.
A “metapsychology” is a psychoanalytic theory of the way the mind works (Gardner, 1993: 175). Object relations theory is the third, and definitive, psychoanalytic metapsychology as enunciated by Freud; and taken forward by work of the theorists of the British object relations tradition: Winnicott, Fairbairn and Guntrip, and the Kleinian school represented by Bion, Rosenfeld, Segal. See Mitchell and Black (1995, chapter 5). Other schools—classical Freudian, American object relations, Lacanian—may offer analogous accounts, but with less explanatory scope and power.
- 3.
Thanks to the editor for this last point; see also Williams on the suicide of Ajax (1993, chapter 4).
- 4.
One such chance was that of being taken into slavery, a state of living of life in a world where there is no place even for shame at loss of agency, nor loss of value in the eyes of another. This, to borrow a phrase of Williams from elsewhere, is not a situation that is a “real option for us” (1985: 161) even to imagine; what Williams implies in this expression is that certain situations are not imaginable by us as we are, and if we were in them we would not only not be as we are now, we would not be recognisable to us as we are now; there is a limit to our comprehension.
- 5.
This complexity can be resolved if we recall that shame, as a psychological universal, is a natural psychological capacity to represent oneself in relation to an inner figure. On a psychoanalytic developmental account, primary helplessness arises from rupture of attachment to a figure on which the child is dependent. This primary fear, re-activated by the condemnatory gaze of the ego-ideal, is exploited in social shame which has the secondary, functional role of motivating compliance.
- 6.
- 7.
The concept of shame can be deepened ethically by considering that its relation to guilt implies two dimensions of self-evaluation of one’s actions: “What I have done points in one direction towards what has happened to others, in another direction to what I am” (Williams, 1993: 92). The first then stands to “learn from” the second: “shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself” (p. 93); we understand our own shortcomings when we can understand their effects on others.
- 8.
While this emphasis on the other’s gaze might make shame seem more a “narcissistic” emotion than guilt, since the gaze is turned on the subject, while the victim’s anger draws attention to the victim, making guilt an other-regarding emotion, the imputation of shame as simply a narcissistic wounding is too narrow.
- 9.
The power of the gaze to enforce through threat of its withdrawal is notably explored by Norbert Elias (1939). In another register, the “Still Face” experiments conducted by Edward Tronick in the 1970s show the infant’s vital need for engagement with the gaze of another.
- 10.
Construing dismissal by an abstracted ideal figure as an act of psychological violence, when such a figure is not obviously qualified to be an agent capable of acts of any sort, would require postulating it as the result of projection by the subject experiencing the helplessness of diminishment.
- 11.
This suggestive term is Wollheim’s; it conveys the formal aspect of functional analysis: anxiety is the input “argument” to the function, the function itself is defensive misrepresentation, and shame is the output value.
- 12.
The precise detail of its uptake into a morality system is then, as noted, contextually contingent. But it will already be an effective functional force in the mind, manifesting in a variety of object-relational configurations from the (optimistic) one of a benign ego-ideal to which the subject can refer herself for validation (see Williams, 1993) to a more pessimistic one of a mind in thrall to the “projective dispositions” (Wollheim, 1984: 208–209) seen in attitudes, such as blame, resentment and sentimental idealisation, in which shame is disowned or denied. These latter states already represent an internal violence to the integrity of thought, in the splitting off of unwanted affect and its projective re-attribution elsewhere. This is the structure of paranoia, whose defensive function is the maintenance of psychic tranquillity, albeit at the expense of reality.
- 13.
The terror under which the subject lives is fear of the superego as the “archaic object” of Kleinian theory. This is the inner figure, initially endowed by the infant with all the powers of the parent, which then becomes further laden with its own projected and disowned aggression; the infant fears its own destructiveness.
- 14.
I call Wollheim’s approach a philosophical psychoanalysis to underline the philosophical basis of his uncritical but nevertheless carefully analytic elucidation of psychoanalysis understood as an extension of ordinary psychology; he does not seek to critique psychoanalysis but to bring out its conceptual structure. I argue (Braddock, 2016) that this structure represents a current of German idealist thought in Freud.
- 15.
For Freud, anxiety is anticipatory fear of a “situation of danger”; the danger that is threatened is the “traumatic situation”; the experience of helplessness in the face of disruptive incursion into the mind, crucially, of need unfulfilled. This is a “particular injury to our psychical economics” which overwhelms the mind’s capacity (operating under the pleasure principle) to process or contain the disruption. This failure is the “traumatic situation” which is to be avoided and so is signalled by anxiety, most particularly in the form of dread as an objectless affect; what is traumatic is experience itself, here of helplessness; the representation (in memory) of the traumatic situation of helplessness supplies the affect of anxiety with an object. Anxiety then is object-directed; most usually, it is the object whose presence would meet the instinctual need (1932: 94).
- 16.
See footnote 4.
- 17.
This differs from American versions of object relations theory in its emphasis on the affective transformation of content posited in Kleinian theory’s conception of unconscious phantasy.
- 18.
As Jonathan Lear (2004) has noted, in postulating an inner figure as bearer of cultural norms and values, Williams comes near to a psychoanalytic account of moral psychology.
- 19.
Psychoanalytic theorists disagree over whether “annihilation anxiety”, as a term used to designate the fear of one’s non-existence, can have any content.
- 20.
The full extent of the catastrophe is reflected in the phenomenology of what may be called “extreme states of mind”; the “deathly state of mind” described in Kleinian analysis as canonical for the working of the Death drive. I would argue that this clinical picture, while aptly described in these terms, is nevertheless a misrepresentation of the mind’s attempt to think its predicament.
- 21.
I have intentionally avoided explaining the self-violence of shame in terms of masochism. Provisionally, I take the question, whether psychoanalytic theory entails that preservation of subjectivity must involve sexualisation, to be answered in the negative.
- 22.
Freud notes that the infant’s helplessness is expressed in the forceful expulsion of its cry.
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Braddock, L. (2022). Shame and the Self. In: Gerodimos, R. (eds) Interdisciplinary Applications of Shame/Violence Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05570-6_4
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