Prologue: Shame: Sources and Trajectories

At that first signal of shame, I know that something is very wrong in my world, and I have a sinking feeling that that something is me. As the “most deeply personal of emotional experiences” (Nathanson, 1992, p. 21), shame makes its claim to the “whole self’” (Lewis, 1971, p. 40) while at the same time depending for its existence on the gaze of the other. Shame in its most extreme form is marked by an “implosion of the self” (Laing, 1960, p. 46): one physiologically collapses. One becomes as small as is possible. One bows one’s head. One turns one’s body in on itself. One averts one’s eye. One longs to evaporate and yearns “not, as people say, to sink through the floor, but rather … that the space occupied by me should be instantaneously empty” (Williams, 1993, p. 89).

Shame can double in on itself. One feels that familiar sting of shame, only to then feel ashamed of feeling ashamed, then, of course, ashamed of feeling ashamed of feeling ashamed (Morrison, 2011). A patient lost in such recursions can stir the analyst’s lurking fear that they too are fundamentally not up to the task, primarily a charlatan and certainly a fraud, and now, as is evident, in the throes of their very own shameful experience of shame (Harris, 2011, p. 725). Even as it is hard to imagine an analytic session in which some element of shame – be it embarrassment, disgrace, shyness, defensive grandiosity, contempt, or rage – does not make its appearance, the contagious and transmittable elements of shame explain why it is so often evaded and avoided, even dissociated (Bromberg, 2006). Some have suggested that this means shame belongs neither to patient nor analyst, but is intersubjectively created and sustained, exacerbated surely, processed, even held, perhaps, by and through that relational context (Orange, 2008). Others, also noticing the propensity to evade, have rooted shame in the pernicious complementarity of doer/done-to dynamics (Benjamin, 2022). Irrespective of its relational form, the