Is It Shame? Inhibitions of Writing as Just a Candidate

In the buzzing hallways of psychoanalytic institutes, where everyday life regains its normal non-classroom dimensions with chitchat, gossip, and discussion about almost everything, questions about writing seem relatively rare. “Did you write your case summary?” is a question that you might consider asking a fellow candidate, but you might hesitate to ask, “What are you writing about?” Why do we have this particular hesitation? Candidates are professionals with a record of various accomplishments and successes, often including previous publications. But what happens when it comes to writing while in candidacy? What is the inhibiting factor at play? Is it shame?

In his fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes, Hans Christian Andersen very skillfully addresses the problematic of shame within the structure of a group. The story begins with an emperor who cared so much about his clothing that he fell prey to two swindlers who claimed that they could fashion for him the finest of all suits, spun from extraordinary cloth that was not only exceptionally beautiful, but also had the special quality of being invisible to anyone who was either stupid or unfit for his position in the court. When the swindlers presented the suit to the emperor, he was ashamed to admit that he was too unfit for his position to see what he was wearing, so he allowed himself to be paraded through the town. The townsfolk, who had heard in advance about the suit's special qualities, were as embarrassed as the emperor to reveal their stupidity by confessing that they, too, could not see what he was wearing, and thus the magnificent suit garnered nothing but the wildest of praise until a small child said: “But the emperor has nothing on!” and soon everyone in the crowd was shouting and laughing that the emperor was wearing no clothes.

“The shamelessness of one forms the veil for the shame of the other,” Lacan observes. Shame might be distinguished from guilt, since shame refers to being seen by and exposed to the Other, while guilt refers to being judged by the Other. In other words, shame is the effect of a primordial Other who sees or does not see, whereas guilt comes later in development and points to the Other who can think, talk, and judge when we transgress common shared values. Shame is the feeling of being exposed, naked, stripped down to our most intimate, deepest, inadequately felt, and nameless sense of who we are. The fear of shame, which seems to be different from shame, speaks to the fear that this exposure can be absolute. “Dying from shame” is a common expression that speaks to this fear. Shame does not play with uncertainty of the sort, “Is there an Other who could see me?” Shame certifies that an Other is there who has the power to see you, to expose you, to make you “dissolve.”

It seems that Andersen's fairy tale is in agreement with Lacan's statement. Shame guarantees that out there, as well as deep inside, there is an emperor dressed in exceptional clothes; but in order to maintain his sovereignty, he needs to be hidden from exposure. But in our candidacy who is this Other who might threaten with fear of absolute exposure of internal nakedness and inhibit the candidate's drive to present a creation of his own to the larger psychoanalytic community?

In our case, perhaps the emperor who believes that he is dressed in exceptional clothes may stand for the candidate's need to idealize/identify with his new “parent,” or, equally well, it might point to the simple reality that still persists to some extent due to the hierarchical organization of our institutes and the exceptional/ideal status of a training analyst. Regardless of what we may think of the hierarchy and where the candidate stands in it, it is not lack that creates trouble, but, as in Andersen's story, our excessive wish to belong to an imagined elite group of exceptional people. This wish can lead to silence, as in the fairy tale, in order to avoid the embarrassment of exposing one's own limitations, i.e., stupidity. The status of candidacy alone implies a set of limitations; and thus the inhibition to write and present to the imagined exceptional Other does not come as a surprise.

In addition, in an era in which psychoanalysis is challenged at its core and is asked to respond to the demands of our contemporary evidence-based world, the candidate is confronted even further with the challenge of finding a voice that, despite anxieties of how it sounds, speaks of the '“love of the truth.” In Anna Freud's words: “If you want to be a real psychoanalyst you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your inner person.” In other words, you must have the courage to be the emperor donning a brand new outfit and, at the same time, the child who shouts, “The emperor has no clothes!”