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During much of its development, psychoanalysis has given scant attention to the affect of shame. The superego was mostly conceived around the questions of an unconscious sense of guilt, of self-punishment, and, perhaps most important, of moral masochism, all very much within the structural theory and the unquestioned centering of psychoanalysis on inner conflict. Then there occurred, about twenty years ago, an almost complete reversal. A number of works have appeared since then that deal very centrally with the shame experience, in examinations often strongly slanted toward interpersonal and social contexts and tied in with early development. The issues of superego, inner conflict, and moral masochism (or masochism altogether) faded more and more into the background. More generally speaking, the pendulum of historical judgment has been swinging farther and farther from the intrapsychic dimension with its conflict and insight orientation and toward the interpersonal/intersubjective dimension with its focus on corrective experience and internalization. Many today eschew the structural and dynamic theory altogether and want to reduce the issues covered by the superego concept of yore by adopting the concepts of values or self-regulating functions and by considering the affects of shame and guilt apart from issues of conflict. There is much merit in this new interest, especially in the serious interest paid to psychic phenomenology in general, and to the study of the affect of shame in particular.
And yet the old alchemistic wisdom and Niels Bohr's motto Contraria sunt complementa (opposites complement each other) (Holton 1973) seems particularly suitable for the progress of understanding in psychoanalysis. We would best understand them as part of a dialectic. Titus, Smith, and Nolan (1986) explain: “The dialectical process is a dialogue between opposing positions.… the dialectic is the development of thought through an interplay of ideas” (p. 10). Hoffman (1994) uses Og