Aspects of Shame in Analysis

One hallmark of neurotic defenses is their inflexibility. Although such defenses are perhaps useful and efficient ways of handling problems at their inception, they are cumbersome relics of the past. Yet, despite the obvious high cost of maintaining these defenses, they are abandoned only with great difficulty. The reasons for their persistence are many, but one of the frequent factors is shame. The fear of shame is a powerful stabilizer of pathology and the successful handling of this fear is essential for the most mutative changes in the course of some analyses.

A case is presented here in which the role of shame was unusually pronounced and required special attention to its technical handling and its relation to the stability of defenses. Because of the exaggerated importance of shame, this case offered an opportunity to identify certain technical factors that are applicable to other cases in which the role of shame is more subtle, but equally important.

Shame is an affect that follows the revelation of a previously hidden shortcoming of the self. As an affect, it is a very unpleasant feeling state characterized by flushing, a loss for words, a feeling of embarassment and a wish that the earth-would-swallow-me-up and hence be covered once again. The revelation can be to the eyes of important others or to one's own eyes; the necessary ingredients for shame are that the content of the revelation has been previously hidden and represents a current shortcoming of the self, as defined by the disparity between one's self-image and the goals set for the self by the ego-ideal.

Piers1 emphasizes the structural role of the ego-ideal and the ego in shame. He sees it as a tension between the two arising from the disparity between ego assessment and ego goals. The goals are considered a product of the “maturation drive … a psychic representation of all the growth maturation and individuation processes in the human being” (p. 15). Piers views the question of placement