On Shyness

Like depression, envy, boredom and other symptomatic states, shyness is reported by virtually all patients now and again as part of their varied experience of the psychopathology of everyday life. And in some patients shyness is a prominent symptom. For so ubiquitous an experience there are not many direct studies of it in the psychoanalytic literature. Of note are Kaufman (1941), Lewinsky (1941), Glover (1956) and Sandler et al.(1958). Fenichel's references to shyness (1945) are passing; he alluded to it by one of its customary labels 'social anxiety'. Nominal studies, however, do not exhaust the literature on shyness. The subject is lively, if latent, within a constellation of studies having to do with its obverse, which goes by various names such as poise (Rangell, 1954), 'confident expectation' (Benedek, 1938) and 'basic trust' (Erikson, 1950). Also, the subject of shyness is latent within certain studies of social self-representation, like Greenacre's on the impostor (1958b), Ross's on the 'as if' concept (1967), Kernberg's on the narcissistic personality (1970). Thus an inquiry into shyness will involve a collation of topics of varying apparent relevance. This will complicate our clinical interest in this common symptom and hopefully our clinical approach to it.

Principally I should like to advance the psychology of shyness by relating its phenomenology to a psychoanalytic perspective. One of the promises of such a perspective is the discovery of more than one derivation for what often passes as one phenomenology. That is, neurotic shyness arises out of a different set of dynamics from shyness in certain schizophrenics and in very young children. Indeed, like depression (Bibring, 1953); (Rapaport, 1959), shyness may be a response to psychic trial at virtually any level of psychosexual development and may represent part of a fundamental 'loss complex' susceptible in the normal, neurotic, narcissistic, schizophrenic and immature personalities.

Also, a