The Many Faces of Shame: Edited by Donald L. Nathanson. New York/London: The Guilford Press, 1987. 370 pp.

Piers and Singer's Shame and Guilt in 19531 was a pioneering work on shame. But few investigators followed the trail until the landmark

contributions of Tomkins,2 Lewis,3 and Wurmser4. Since then, there has been a burgeoning of research on shame by workers in diverse disciplines, including practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic baby-watchers. In spite of the accumulation of an impressive body of knowledge, the importance of shame is ignored in much of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature.

Passionately concerned about redressing this neglect, Donald L. Nathanson persuaded his eleven distinguished co-authors to join him in consolidating current facts and theories about shame in one volume. The result is one of the best organized and executed multiauthored works I have enjoyed. It serves as a handbook on the detection and therapeutic handling of shame in its many gross and subtle manifestations. We are offered differing stimulating theoretical insights, but an integrated theory of shame—integrated with the other affects and integrating psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic research—is still to be done. Some of the contributions in this volume are more substantial than others, but the least are well written and instructive. I have only one major complaint about the book as a whole: the index is too skimpy for its abundant contents. The references supplied by the authors constitute a splend