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This book is a most welcome addition to the literature on shame, an area which has received much interesting and fruitful investigation over the last 30 years. Helen Block Lewis' Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, Heinz Kohut's The Analysis of the Self, Leon Wurmser's The Mask of Shame, and Donald Nathanson's Shame and Pride have been some of the most well-known books on this subject to appear during this period. The editors of this book have previously published two excellent books which, in major ways, dealt with this topic: Melvin Lansky's Fathers Who Fall (1992) elegantly stressed the key role of shame in paternal and family psychopathology, while Andrew Morrison's text Shame (1987) focused on shame phenomena as seen from a pragmatically useful self-psychological viewpoint. In this book, Lansky and Morrison carry on with their previous work in a most scholarly and always interesting fashion. This text is remarkable both for the editors' splendid personal contributions and those of other contributors.
In their introduction, Lansky and Morrison stress the importance of understanding shame and shame-related phenomena, the “veiled” accompaniment of a variety of disorders such as narcissistic problems, social phobia, addiction, PTSD, dissociation, masochism, depression, and other disorders.
They stress the importance of a broad-based, integrative psychoanalytic approach without too much emphasis on one given paradigm or set of explanatory concepts. At the same time, Lansky and Morrison also take pains to note that appreciating the clinical importance of shame should not risk an oversimplified formulation, ignoring such phenomena as aggression, envy, and guilt. They note the importance of shame-related phenomena such as superego anxiety (signal shame), shame as defense, and complex feelings such as embarrassment, humiliation, etc., which might obviate exposure, consciously, of the experience of shame. Finally, the authors stress the world of internal and external objects, the