Midwinter Meetings — 1950 Scientific Sessions

At the midwinter meetings held in New York in December, 1950, which were held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the papers presented and the panels held were exceedingly interesting. As usual, we are trying to fulfill the wishes of the membership in publishing the scientific proceedings in as comprehensive a manner as possible. We had hoped to publish the complete scientific proceedings; however, space prevents us from publishing the panels in this issue since they were quite extensive. We will therefore confine ourselves to publishing the summaries of the individual papers presented and hope that in the next issue we will be able to publish a detailed survey of the panel material. We realize that this is a little late but unfortunately we have been overwhelmed with material from our membership and have felt that such material, which is timely and might become dated if postponed, should be given preference.

Gerhart Piers, M.D. (Chicago)

Although feelings of guilt and shame are possibly the most important organized forms of intrapsychic tension, their differences are not clearly understood. There is a larger body of agreement about Guilt, but the definitions of Shame vary considerably. Shame is considered here not as one of the affects, or as a neurotic symptom (like shyness) nor as a character trait (like modesty) but only as a specific form of inner tension normally occurring in Ego development and Super-Ego formation. Freud considered “Scham” (together with “Ekel”) as one of the main barriers against the sexual drive, particularly voyeurism, and thought that this inhibitory mechanism might be organically determined. Fenichel follows Freud in this, but also regards shame as a specific defense against urethral-erotic temptation. Alexander differentiates Shame and Guilt sharply, pointing out the polar antagonism between these two Super-Ego tensions.

The following four structural properties of Shame are suggested: 1) Shame represents a tension between