This volume comprises original papers written by several contemporary North American psychotherapists and psychoanalysts on various topics encompassing shame and its subsequent treatment in clinical encounters. In an introduction and by way of rationale its editor refers to: ‘The rise of narcissism in Western culture' together with its attendant ‘culture of shamelessness'; ‘the spread of psychoanalysis to … “cultures of shame,” referring mostly to the societies of the Far East'; and thirdly the contention that ‘psychoanalytic clinicians are treating more patients whose personality organization, emanating from devastating injuries and humiliations during childhood, is not along the tripartite model of the mind (id-ego-superego) … and whose anxieties are less related to instinct-morality conflicts than to the dread of exposure and narcissistic mortification'.