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As I made my way into the heart of this book, I recalled hearing a Samuel Beckett film described as being about a perceiving eye. The perceived and the perceiver are two aspects of each person. The perceiver is desperate to perceive and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Eventually, one wins. WithIn Others' Eyes: An Analysis of Shame, Günter Harry Seidler takes us inside the human struggle to tolerate what is “other/strange/unfamiliar” in our perception of others and, even more so, in our fantasies of their perceptions of us, where we suffer the shameful possibility of their being taken aback by our otherness, strangeness, and unfamiliarity.
Shame has traveled a long way, conceptually, from a not-internalized version of guilt or a defense against voyeuristic and exhibitionistic impulses, to the multitextured form and central place it has in Seidler's work. Alexander (1938) put forward a theory of a shame-guilt cycle in which aggression leads to guilt, which leads to inhibition of aggression, which occasions an experience of oneself as passive, which leads to shame and then to compensatory aggression and finally more guilt. Piers and Singer (1953) argued that shame is an internalization of the threat of loss of the ego ideal's love, while guilt is an internalization of the castrating father. Lynd (1958) argued that guilt is just the feeling part of trying to be socially well-adjusted and