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With regard to the central importance Freud gave the feeling of shame in his psychology of women, it is surprising not to find very many references to the subject in psychoanalytic literature. Serious writers on shame and guilt, such as Edith Jacobson (1965) and Piers & Singer (1971), do not stress the circumstances that according to Freud make shame the feeling par excellence of woman, namely her genital deficiency. Nor is shame in recent writings on women given that main role in female identity formation which one would think Freud's proposition would have ascribed to it. Usually it is not even dealt with (see for example Blum, 1977, Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1970, Miller, 1974 and Mitchell, 1974). We could from these findings be tempted to draw the conclusion that Freud's suggestions on this special topic have been found irrelevant or invalid and therefore considerably forgotten. This, however, is not the case. At the 7th Nordic Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Denmark during August 1980, Dr. James Anthony (1981) presented a paper that again made apparent the contradictions inherent in some of Freud's writings on women1.
In some psychoanalytic writings shame is seen not only as an emotion potentially evokable in all human beings faced with special situations. It is also regarded as having constitutional roots in certain facts of biology. When related to these conditions, such as for example the female genitals, shame is considered to have a quality of being constitutional and therefore independent of values, ideologies and prejudices of society.
My concern in this article is to argue that shame in women is not a biological given, based on her supposed genital deficiency, and that such a belief if held by an analyst will lead to certain difficulties in his analytic work.