Shame and the Shadow

Webster's Dictionary defines shame as ‘the painful emotion excited by a consciousness of guilt, shortcomings and impropriety’. In this paper I wish to discuss how the emotion of shame sets in during childhood, and how it seems to arise out of the young child's recurrent experiences of his shortcomings, inadequacy and dependency, which accompany his attempts to find out about himself, his mother, her body and his own, and the world around him.

I also want to distinguish between feelings of shame and feelings of guilt, in so far as shame and guilt often occur together as they have certain elements in common. Because of such shared features, the shifts between these two categories are difficult to maintain:

Shame involves attention directed to a specific self-image, i.e. the person recoils in shame over some defect represented in the image. The guilty person attends to his or her action, not to a self-image. By action is meant any production for which the person holds himself or herself responsible, whether a real action or a fantasied unconscious one (MILLER 3).

In the experiences connected with growing up, frustration is unavoidable because, even in the best of situations, there is a gap between the child's subjective feelings of his needs and the mother's more or less empathic understanding and capacity to satisfy them. In infancy this situation is most acute and it leads to the growing infant's slowly experiencing the negative side of dependency; that is, feelings of impotence, helplessness, rage and despair, factors which differ from one baby to another according to their individual resources. Frustration is made more tolerable by omnipotent phantasies of self-fulfilment or by splitting: the good object with its ‘good’ attributes being retained and the ‘bad’, frustrating ones pushed away as far as possible from the self, or vice versa, in the attempt, as Tom Ogden puts it, ‘to separate the endangered from the endangering….’ (OGDEN 4).

Inner and outer space are not yet