Walking Taller, Though Still Wounded: A Discussion of “Wounded But Still Walking: One Man's Effort to Move Out of Shame”

ELIZABETH CARR HAS, INDEED, GIVEN US quite a picture of Aaron—a man deeply mired in shame, convinced of his own unworthiness, his defects, his sense of weakness. She tells us that “shame is at the very center of Aaron's self-experience.” He believes himself to be “rotten to the the core.” Carr uses words like “permeate,” “locked into … human suffering,” “unremitting self-loathing.” These phrases evoke a sense of shame at the deepest level of Aaron's subjectivity—a language of scourge, of profound despair that seeps to the bone of his being. This sense of deepest shame represents the shame of narcissistic vulnerability—the narcissistic roots of what Levin (1967) called “primary shame.” Perhaps an answer, then, to the title question of today's conference—that shame is the primary dysphoric affect in disorders of the self. I believe that I share this perspective with at least two of my colleagues-in-shame participating in today's symposium (Broucek, 1991; Wurmser, 1987).

Even Carr's title implies the heaviness, the burden, the stickiness of shame—in order to “move out” with “effort,” there is implicitly a container filled with something noxious in which one is mired. In a recent paper (Morrison, 1994), I compared shame to fog, “obscuring everything else, imposing only its own shapeless, substanceless