You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This panel, chaired by Benjamin Kilborne, drew on psychoanalytic experiences and theories of shame and humiliation to address current social problems. When shame and humiliation are experienced as narcissistic injuries, they produce more shame. The injured individual wants to hide, feels helpless and enraged, and is preoccupied with sadomasochistic fantasies. The result can be destructive behavior or violence, and guilt over these impulses. Kilborne described these cycles as “shame-rage spirals” and “shame-guilt spirals.” Cycles of humiliation and fixation on one's own injury tend to restrict the capacity for symbol formation or “mentalization” and can contribute to destructive acting out. The panel examined how our resources as analysts can help us understand and ameliorate the destructive consequences of shame and humiliation in various social contexts.
Carlo Strenger, a Swiss-born Israeli analyst, described how shame and humiliation have been transmitted from generation to generation among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Israel, and how that process has affected political and social processes, with complex and harmful consequences. The “Old Jew,” a part of Israel's collective memory, was the European Jew, the victim of the Holocaust. “Old Jews” were “taken like sheep to slaughter.” Strenger hypothesized that European immigrants to Israel, vowing never to experience this kind of humiliation again, were nonetheless unable to integrate this shameful self-image and instead repressed it. They became the psychological opposite, powerful “New Jews,” who were tough, fearless, and able to fight to defend themselves.
Non-European Sephardic Jews began to arrive in Israel in the 1950s, bringing with them a distinct culture and a traditional lifestyle.