Shame and Guilt. A Psycho-Analytic and Cultural Study: By Gerhart Piers and Milton B. Singer. Edited and with a foreword by Roy R. Grinker. (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas; Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1953. Pp. 86. $3.25 or 23 s. 6 d.)

This is the first psychiatric monograph in the American Lecture Series. It begins with Dr. Piers' study 'Shame and Guilt', which is of considerable theoretical and clinical interest. Developing Alexander's formulations of the phenomenological and dynamic differences between inferiority feelings and guilt feelings, Piers postulates a structural distinction as well. For this purpose he puts forward one of the recurrent attempts at stricter differentiation between the ego-ideal aspect of the superego and the superego proper. He uses the term superego 'exclusively as stemming from internalization of the punishing, restrictive aspects of the parental images', whereas the ego-ideal represents 'the sum of the positive identifications with the images of both the loving-reassuring and the narcissistically expecting parents'. In addition the ego-ideal, based on a core of narcissistic omnipotence, contains the later, more superficial, identifications as well as the conscious and unconscious awareness of the ego's potentialities. The main propositions are: '(1) Shame arises out of a tension between the ego and the ego-ideal, not between ego and superego as in guilt. (2) Whereas guilt is generated whenever a boundary (set by the superego) is touched or transgressed, shame occurs when a goal (presented by the ego-ideal) is not being reached. (3) The unconscious irrational threat implied in shame anxiety is abandonment, and not mutilation (castration) as in guilt.'

It is interesting to compare this thesis, which claims better potentialities as to maturation and progress for the 'shame-driven' as against the 'guilt-ridden' individual, with relevant formulations by other authors; e.g. Flugel's on the conflicts between 'the more progressive, enlightened aims of the more conscious levels of the ego-ideal and the more conservative taboo-like standards of the primitive levels of the superego', and Money-Kyrle's on the 'bad' (hated) and the 'good' (loved) aspects of the superego,