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After a long period in which shame and shame dynamics were unappreciated, there has been an explosion of interest in shame over the last 20 years (Kohut, 1971; Lansky, 1992; Lewis, 1971; Morrison, 1989; Wurmser, 1981). A heavy emphasis on shame very early in the history of psychoanalysis was followed by an almost complete eclipse of attention to shame after Freud's (1905) turn to intrapsychic fantasy, with shame conflicts poorly conceptualized and acknowledged mostly in relation to conflicts involving anality and exhibitionism. Interest in shame had a somewhat veiled reemergence in 1914 with the study of narcissism and the ego ideal. It came to be appreciated fully only following the work of Heinz Kohut and Helen Block Lewis in 1971. I will touch somewhat briefly on matters relating to the history of explicit psychoanalytic thinking about shame because I want to deal mainly with the impact of an understanding on the basic psychoanalytic concepts that are more implicit than explicit and that may even appear not to be related to shame. Because we use these concepts clinically and theoretically in doing and conceptualizing our work every day, we may form inexact and positively incorrect notions of clinical material if the role of shame is not appreciated.
Let me say at the outset that emphasis on shame is not just a matter of exchanging one affect for another. Shame is the affect that signals the threat of danger to the social bond (Scheff, 1990). Shame results from any exposure that challenges the integrity of the self before others, and the self defined as a self before others, or the sense of self resulting from a self-evaluation derived from an internalization of that view before others — that is to say, potentially