Shame is the emotion that mediates the developing infant’s sense of synchrony with their social world. Between the ages of 1 and 2, the social world of infancy is characterized by here-and-now enactive rhythms with others, and shame comes about through ruptures in those present moment interactions. Between the ages of 3 and 5, with increasing narrative fluency through conversations, the toddler develops an ability to reflect on past actions in the company of others. They now can experience shame for actions they performed (or failed to perform) in the past that didn’t live up to the expectations of a familial community of minds. We understand both the purely enactive and the reflective versions of shame as operating on a continuum. On one end, shame functions as a signal to repair misalliances. On the other, shame can become a totalizing experience of isolation and self-consciousness. We use these ideas to explore, in novel ways, certain psychoanalytic phenomena such as dissociation, narcissism, PTSD and body-dysmorphia.