There is an old parable about trained incapacities. At an intersection in a small town, there occurs a major motor vehicle collision of cars driven by twin brothers. Within an hour, all the town's professionals arrive at the scene. The policeman sees only the case of a jumped red light; the medical internist sees only blood and compromised organs; the attorney sees none of the above, but notices car damage and begins to recreate the scene. The civil engineer knows nothing of blood or blame, but notices that the town's new traffic median has been damaged. What, I wonder, would the psychoanalyst see? Perhaps our contribution would be to look for motivation.
The psychoanalytic community has increasingly sought to weigh in on matters of public debate, and among the themes present at the January Winter Meeting in New York was that of terror, torture, and the so-called War on Terrorism. Most wars are, at least in part, about symbols of ethnic or religious hatreds. At their core, however, whether it is over land, raw materials, or access to maritime ports, they have traditionally been understood to be about competing, often mutually exclusive, geostrategic interests. But with the growing belief that the current War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq are as much battles between symbols and values as they are about munitions, the psychoanalytic community must bring its trained expertise—namely insight into motivation and hence behavior—into the public realm.
Throughout the conference, a number of arguments were made on these subjects. Slides were shown. Questions were asked. One concept that tied several of the discussions together was the role that shame plays in the motivation for hostile acts. As a topic, “shame” is as hot today as it is poorly defined—both in psychoanalytic discourse and in public political discourse about terrorism and torture. Together with its next of kin, guilt, shame operates consciously and unconsciously, internally and interpersonally. Just as we have become accustomed to viewing guilt as a kind of emotional debt, including intergenerational debt, so too are we increasingly realizing the role of shame as a form of intergenerational connection.
The redressing of shame, the undoing of humiliation, and the reinstating of honor—these themes are brought to the fore by Vamik Volkan in trying to understand the group and individual psychology of terrorism.
The redressing of shame, the undoing of humiliation, and the reinstating of honor—these themes are brought to the fore by Vamik Volkan in trying to understand the group and individual psychology of terrorism. Volkan contends that societies have chosen glories as well as chosen traumas. The latter are historically transmitted memories that are based on, but not limited to, historic facts. What can a man do with his shame and humiliation? If he expresses it outwardly as an individual, he will be killed. So he turns it inward and transmits it to the next generation. Thus it is the transmitted mental representation that becomes the shame and humiliation, rather than the actual memory of these traumas that can become the organizing concept of a group identity generations later.
The torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was also about shame. In an academic-psychoanalytic exchange on terror and torture chaired by Kimberlyn Leary, the photographs were explored as repositories of shame in and of themselves. In contrast to other wartime photographs where photography was used as a journalistic medium, in this case, the act of photographing naked Arab men in compromising positions was used as a means of shaming the prisoners. The actual photographs themselves then stand as a perpetual shaming device. But the border of these photographs is yet still undefined because they implicate the photographer as well. The viewer can just see the American prison guards winking and posing in their “thumbs up” fashion as they take their trophy snapshots of the shamed and humiliated other.
And then there is the noxious brew of shame and rage felt by the young suicide bombers who attacked the United States on 9/11. Here again, uniquely economic and political views of the origin of terrorism are useful but limited as they focus on the outer world and largely ignore the inner psychic world of the individual. (It was not the poorest members of society that were the 9/11 hijackers, nor was the attack on New York City in their collective geostrategic political interest.) It is postulated that in these individuals must reside the desire for an aggressive response to a perceived loss. As Lord Alderdyce, the former head of the Irish National Assembly, pointed out in his talk, terrorism is not a belief system, but a tactic to promulgate fear. The target is not the victim, but the authority which is perceived to be responsible for the actors' shame—and perhaps even more importantly, the shame and humiliation of their fathers.
As an analytic community, our business is insight. More than any other profession, we put motivation, both conscious and unconscious, at the center of our inquiries. We comfortably explore notions of aggression, ambivalence, and shame as we seek to understand behavior.
Steven Kleiner, M.D., is a psychiatry resident at the Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is currently a fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
As such, we arrive at the table of public debate (often uninvited) with a unique and much needed contribution. But as a community, we must be painfully aware of the seductive role that understanding motivation has in the service of justification for action. Understanding motivation must not supplant moral evaluation, but must sit alongside it. If we are to avoid irrelevance in the public policy debate, we must remember that the unique position that allows us to sit astride these two intellectual postures does not give us license to blur the lines between them.