Working with Shame in Psychoanalytic Treatment

Shame is a central human affect, reflecting feelings of defect, inferiority, and failure of the self. It is, therefore, a proper focus for psychoanalytic treatment. Beginning with Freud's seminal attention to narcissism and the ego ideal, the possibility for studying shame and its relation to the ego ideal (i.e. the loving function of the superego) was inherent in psychoanalytic theory, but Freud's pursuit of intrapsychic conflict and the punitive superego postponed further elaboration of shame. Interest in the relation of the ego ideal to the superego (Hartmann, 1950); (Reich, 1954), and in the ideal self (Sandler et al., 1963); (Schafer, 1960), (1967) opened the way to further study of shame. Kohut's contributions, with their focus on narcissism and self-pathology, have given a language and perspective on self-deficits allowing elaboration of shame's place in psychoanalytic treatment.

In this paper, I have focused on the treatment of shame in two patients. I suggest that shame lies at the very center of the narcissistic patient's pathology, with primary internal shaming (directed at the self's failures and inadequacies) permeating all aspects of the treatment. For the neurotic patient, shame is more circumscribed, reflecting partial failures of the self; it tends to be reactive, relating to passive withdrawal from internal conflict and castration fears, and is intermixed with oedipal manifestations. I have described clinical sequences that demonstrate my approach to working with shame in each of these patients. In both cases, the task is to recognize, acknowledge, accept, and investigate the patient's shame. Only after such empathic investigation can underlying conflictual and genetic derivatives be productively pursued. This sequence is often intuitively followed in analysis, but in this paper I have attempted to articulate more systematically shame's role in psychoanalytic treatment.