Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Lawrence Chalfin questioned whether humiliation operated as a signal affect motivating symptom-formation in the cases cited. He wondered if Dr. Stamm's concept added a crucial element to our understanding of these cases; could more traditional concepts be used to explain them? Can we ascribe humiliation in these cases strictly to 'narcissistic injuries from the external world and/or tensions related to failure to satisfy the ego ideal'? Dr. Chalfin noted that humiliation also appears in response to superego and other anxieties.

Dr. Theodore Lipin observed that Dr. Stamm's focus might help the therapist to be more precise in his efforts at either shoring up the patient's ego functions or temporarily 'loaning' the patient some of the benefits of his own ego functions, but that this focus cannot initiate, sustain, and utilize the special psychoanalytic process which reduces symptomatology by restructuring the hierarchical levels of the mind. Affects by themselves are unreliable to use for metapsychological explorations, clinical investigations, and therapeutic intervention because any given one at any given moment has such a multitude of actual and potential sources within the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Activity anywhere in this double complex can produce an affect that will be consciously registered. To focus primarily on one affect in an attempt to delineate accurately some relevant aspects of psychic organizations, dynamics, and determinants can be misleading.

Dr. George Wiedeman stated that he did not share Dr. Stamm's view that humiliation is an affect analogous to signal anxiety. Humiliation, if consciously perceived, can be experienced differently, depending on the past history, personality structure, and reality situation of the individual. After giving some examples of the possible affective and behavioral consequences of humiliation, Dr. Wiedeman said that it was clear that humiliation could not be put on a par with anxie