Epilogue: Shame: Sources and Trajectories

This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry has foregrounded many important aspects of the shame experience: shame in development, the shame of aggressive feelings in small children, shame as a sequel to intense trauma, the Black experience of shame, shame as a totalizing phenomenon, shame as a creative social force, the role of shame in couples’ therapy, shame in analytic supervision. And yet as we try to find our way to an epilogue to wrap things up, we only see new ways to think about shame that we didn’t get to and new ideas that we are just beginning to get a hold of but too late. More could be said about how the experience of shame evolves through the lifespan. An entire issue could be devoted to shame during adolescence, a time when its shaping force seems to come from all directions at once. More certainly could be said about the social implications involved in the evasion of shame through projecting it onto others, a phenomenon noted most recently, and most eloquently, by Benjamin (2021). A cross-cultural analysis would be helpful too, as the examples in all these papers are from Western society. Our very attitude toward shame as the “Cinderella of the unpleasant emotions” might well be mediated by the culture we grew up in.

We are proud of this issue. We worked hard on it. We hope our articles and the articles of all the other authors will be appreciated in their own right, but we also hope they will serve as an invitation for further exploration into this commonplace but often neglected phenomenon.

Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D.

Allison Merrick, Ph.D., Psy.D.

Issue Editors

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Issue Editors

Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D., currently serves as editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He has published numerous articles and co-hosts the podcast The Conversation with Daniel Posner. Daniel’s book Storying in Psychoanalysis and the Everyday World will be published by Routledge early next year. Daniel i