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Bringing together temporality and shame, this book, which won the 2018 American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) prize for best edited book, inevitably brings together psychoanalysis and philosophy. The latter pair have been uncomfortable bedfellows since Freud first put pen to paper - but when it comes to mutual influence, psychoanalysis and (especially continental) philosophy are by now thoroughly and inextricably intertwined.
The book's reader is presented with a selection of essays, each of which seeks to shed light, both psychological and philosophical, upon temporality and shame, and more importantly, the ways in which they impact each other. Since both shame and temporality are topics sufficiently important to warrant their own separate volumes, the project feels ambitious. Mostly, that ambition pays off.
When the book works it works brilliantly. Sue Austin's chapter ‘Existential shame, temporality and cracks in the ordinary “filled in” process of things’, is beautifully written, wears its learning lightly, and is grounded in clinical work with patients ‘whose inner lives are dominated by self-hatred and shame’ (p. 119). Austin makes a convincing and moving case for the role of shame as a ‘crack in subjectivity’ (p. 119) that can ultimately enable the patient to ‘catch sight of [the] otherness’ of the unconscious, leading to changes in their visceral sense of inner time (p. 119).
Both of the chapters written by professional philosophers are excellent. The more difficult of the two is Daniel Ross' ‘The pharmacology of shame or, Promethean, Epimethean and Antigonian temporality’, which focuses on contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler's comprehensive rethinking of the relations between shame (and shamelessness) and technology. Ross brilliantly communicates Stiegler's subtle and complex argument through the myths of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and finally, through a fresh elaboration of a myth much loved by philosophers: that of Antigone. I cannot beg