Shame and the Idea of a Central Affect

SHAME IS ABOUT THE SELF. The word as we now understand it refers, not simply to one type of affect, but to a complex emotional system regulating the social bond, that is, signaling disturbance to the status of the self within the social order: what one is before oneself and others; one's standing, importance, or lack of it; one's lovability, sense of acceptability, or imminent rejection, as seen before the eye of the other or the internal self-evaluative eye of the self. This essential relationship to the self is in contrast to the domain of guilt, which does not concern the self—what one is—so much as it does what one does—real or fantasied actions, transgressions, or omissions that harm the other.

I shall trace some of the details of this linkage of shame and the self and also the evolving understanding of the phenomenology of shame and of the relation of this to the understanding of the centrality of self-experience to a wide range of disturbances that we may call disorders of the self.

I shall nonetheless contend that seeing shame as the central affect of disorders of the self is highly problematic and involves a conceptual error that, if it holds us captive, risks impeding our understanding of the phenomenology of shame, of the psychopathology of self disorders, and of the significance of psychodynamics generally.

In presenting my line of thinking, I shall discuss first the loss and rediscovery of attention to shame in the history of psychoanalysis and