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Once described as the “Cinderella of unpleasant emotions” (Rycroft, 1968, p. 152), shame has undergone a major transformation. The prom queen of affect might be the more apt designation for today. In recent years, there has been a rapidly growing shame literature, popular and professional. Affects, in general, are in ascendancy. The emphasis on affects and affect theory in contemporary psychoanalysis reveals a growing conviction that affect, not drive, is “the central motivational construct for psychoanalysis” (Stolorow, 1991, p. 174). Drive theory does not appear to have the hold on psychoanalytic thinking it did in the past.
Despite these trends, there are still many psychoanalytic authors who either ignore or give only passing mention to shame. There is no listing for shame in both A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (Hinshelwood, 1989) and the older The Language of Psychoanalysis (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973). Langs's (1976) exhaustive study of the literature on therapeutic interaction essentially ignores the subject of shame. Evidently, when drive theory predominates, the focus is on guilt; shame is either ignored or simply subsumed in an undifferentiated fashion under the heading of guilt. On the other hand, the Oxford English Dictionary has a much more extensive listing for shame than it does for guilt, attesting to the importance of this concept in language and culture. Shame is discussed at length by Darwin (1872) and is repeatedly referred to in early Freud, prior to his development of the structural theory with its emphasis on drives and guilt. Now, after a prolonged period of oversight, coinciding with the preeminence of drive theory, there is renewed effort to focus on shame, to differentiate it from other affects, and to clarify its position in psychoanalytic theory. This recent concentration on shame seems to be in response to a