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Man is the only animal that blushes, Mark Twain remarked (1897, p. 256). We blush when we are embarrassed, or worse, mortified, and when we are feeling ashamed. Shame is both more primitive than guilt—the toddler can feel shame well before she emerges from the oedipal crisis—and more mature. For while guilt can direct one's attention to those one has wronged and who now demand reparation, Bernard Williams (2008)
writes, “it cannot by itself help one to understand one's relations to those happenings, or to rebuild a self that has done these things and the world in which that self has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions of what one is and how one is related to others” (p. 93). The very capacity for shame testifies to an alert moral sense.
Of all the emotions, with the possible exception of love in its various forms, guilt has drawn the most attention from psychoanalysts. Its cousin, shame, was fairly neglected until the early seventies, when Piers and Singer published a new edition of Shame and Guilt, their landmark study of 1953. One of the factors contributing to the increased interest in shame among psychoanalysts, Akhtar writes in his introduction to Shame, a new volume of essays on the subject which he has edited and to which he is a contributor, “is that psychoanalytic clinicians are treating more patients whose personality organization, emanating from devastating injuries and humiliations during childhood, is not along the tripartite model of the mind (id-ego-superego) and whose anxieties are less related to instinct-morality conflicts than to the dread of exposure and narcissistic mortification” (p. xix). Akhtar does not comment on why this might be so.
The structure of Shame parallels that of Akhtar's recent Greed: both books bring together a number of essays, primarily by well-known psychoanalysts, that are grouped together under the headings “Developmental Realm,” “Cultural Realm,” and “Clinical Realm.” For the best introduction