Scham und Schuld – Sein und Tun

Shame and guilt are affective experiential dimensions regulating the different forms of being and behaving in a social context. Constructive or even pathologic feelings of guilt are to be distinguished from real guilt. Shame refers to the judgment of ?So-sein” even if being often manifests itself in action. Shame is generated by the ideal ego. Guilt and feelings of guilt are dimensions of acting, real guilt requires the recognition of guilt, guilt is generated by the superego (conscience). The implications of familiar as well as extreme traumatisation for shame and feelings of guilt are discussed. The most frequent wish for a therapy nowadays that offers perspectives of changes by action can be considered as a defence against processing of the being in psychoanalytical therapy.     

Application of Group Psychotherapy to the Teaching of Dynamic Psychiatry and Understanding Student Resistances

Abstract

This paper explores the role of excitement in shame, extending the theoretical underpinnings of my work (Aledort, 2002, 2003, 2008, 2009) on narcissism and the omnipotent child syndrome. Shame, excitement, and early narcissistic self-states are complexly intermingled, each influencing the other. Empathy alone is insufficient; the passion connected to shame can be easily hidden. Detailed case studies describe a model for working with the excitement in shame, how it functions, and how it gets resolved.     

建设性还是破坏性?羞愧的双路径模型

羞愧是一种典型的自我意识情绪, 在个体行为以及心理发展结果中发挥着重要作用。羞愧同时是一种中国传统文化中极为重要的道德情绪, 被认为是中国人自我反省的重要途径。但当前关于羞愧的导向性存在两个截然相反的观点:羞愧导向建设性还是破坏性?理论模型包括:其一, 羞愧导向破坏性, 相应的理论解释有社会威胁防御模型、羞愧调节模型等, 其二, 羞愧导向建设性, 相应的理论解释有进化心理学视角及功能主义视角等。这两种观点均得到大量实证研究的支持。为了合理解释这一分歧, 系统理解羞愧促发的行动机制, 本文提出羞愧的双路径结构模型, 突出社会自我威胁评估在其中的重要作用。未来研究需要开发出更客观全面的羞愧测量方法, 基于文化差异关注社会自我修复的影响因素, 理解不同文化背景社会对羞愧的诠释, 从而提出更具针对性的干预方法, 以促进个体羞愧可能的破坏性结果向建设性方向转化。     

Maternal Guilt and Shame: Relationship to Postnatal Depression and Attitudes towards Help-Seeking

Existing literature indicates that women can experience feelings of shame and guilt in relation to motherhood. This study investigated whether maternal feelings of shame and guilt were associated with postnatal depressive symptoms and attitudes towards help-seeking. A cross-sectional, correlational design was employed. Shame and guilt were measured as both dispositional factors and contextual factors i.e. in relation to motherhood (event-related shame and guilt). A UK community sample of 183 mothers with an infant between 4?weeks and 1?year of age completed a series of online questionnaires. The results indicated that shame proneness significantly predicted postnatal depressive symptoms once demographics and social support had been accounted for. Furthermore, shame proneness significantly predicted less positive attitudes towards help-seeking. Guilt proneness was not a significant predictor of postnatal depressive symptoms or attitudes towards help-seeking. These findings highlight the potential negative consequences of maternal feelings of shame in the postnatal period.     

Moving beyond “shame is bad”: How a functional emotion can become problematic

Shame research has been divided. At present, the shame literature can be broadly dichotomized into whether it argues for a problematic or functional view of shame. Shame is commonly linked, for example, to aggression, poor health and wellbeing, and psychopathologies such as post‐traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, and depression. Some researchers, however, suggest that shame is functional as it serves the purpose of gauging when one's social self is threatened, because of a loss of status or social bonds. To resolve this conflict, shame has been redefined in a variety of ways in an attempt to distinguish functional shame from problematic shame. However, approaches that ever more narrowly define the construct can lead to a defining away of the complexity of the lived experience of shame. In this review, we integrate the conflicting research on shame, examining how shame, as an emotion that evolved for a functional purpose, can become problematic. Avoidance in response to shame can move shame from being a functional social gauge that motivates repair to a problematic emotion, and avoidance is more likely to the extent that shame seems irreparable. Therefore, understanding what factors impact on perceived reparability will be important for understanding how shame can become problematic. How we see ourselves, others, our actions, and the costs of repair are all likely to impact on whether or not shame becomes functional or problematic.     

Development and Preliminary Validation of a New Measure to Assess Shame: The Shame Inventory

Research on the emotion of shame has increased significantly in recent years. However, there remains a need for more psychometrically sound measures of shame, including measures of shame in response to specific, idiographic experiences. The Shame Inventory was developed in order to assess both global feelings of shame as well as shame in response to specific life events or personal characteristics. Two studies were conducted to determine the preliminary psychometric properties of the Shame Inventory. Across both studies, results indicate that the inventory has high internal consistency, test-retest reliability, construct validity, and predictive validity. The Shame Inventory holds promise as a new measure designed to assess both global feelings of shame as well as specific shame-eliciting cues.     

Working with shame in psychoanalytic treatment

Shame is a central human affect, reflecting feelings of defect, inferiority, and failure of the self. It is, therefore, a proper focus for psychoanalytic treatment. Beginning with Freud's seminal attention to narcissism and the ego ideal, the possibility for studying shame and its relation to the ego ideal (i.e. the loving function of the superego) was inherent in psychoanalytic theory, but Freud's pursuit of intrapsychic conflict and the punitive superego postponed further elaboration of shame. Interest in the relation of the ego ideal to the superego (Hartmann, 1950; Reich, 1954), and in the ideal self (Sandler et al., 1963; Schafer, 1960, 1967) opened the way to further study of shame. Kohut's contributions, with their focus on narcissism and self-pathology, have given a language and perspective on self-deficits allowing elaboration of shame's place in psychoanalytic treatment. In this paper, I have focused on the treatment of shame in two patients. I suggest that shame lies at the very center of the narcissistic patient's pathology, with primary internal shaming (directed at the self's failures and inadequacies) permeating all aspects of the treatment. For the neurotic patient, shame is more circumscribed, reflecting partial failures of the self; it tends to be reactive, relating to passive withdrawal from internal conflict and castration fears, and is intermixed with oedipal manifestations. I have described clinical sequences that demonstrate my approach to working with shame in each of these patients. In both cases, the task is to recognize, acknowledge, accept, and investigate the patient's shame. Only after such empathic investigation can underlying conflictual and genetic derivatives be productively pursued. This sequence is often intuitively followed in analysis, but in this paper I have attempted to articulate more systematically shame's role in psychoanalytic treatment.     

Seeing and being seen: Shame in the clinical situation

Shame may prevent the patient from emerging from a psychic retreat. As begins to do so he confronts two fears, first of seeing the object more clearly and second of being seen become prominent. Seeing leads to deeper and more distressing feelings connected with guilt and depression as the damage done to good objects is recognized. However it cannot be faced if shame leads to a demand for immediate relief. Shame is a prominent feature of the analytic situation and recognizing this may help the analyst to support his patients to tolerate the discomfort of being seen so that the conflicts about seeing can be worked through. Two clinical examples are briefly discussed. In the first feelings of inferiority lessened as they were analysed and allowed appreciative and depressive feelings to emerge. In the second embarrassment was associated with progress that the patient felt he had made but was embarrassed to admit. It is argued that the analysis of shame in the analytic situation is necessary so that being seen can be tolerated and allow the conflicts over seeing to be worked through.     

Shame behind the corner? A daily diary investigation of pathological narcissism

This study investigated the association between narcissism and shame, considering different measures of narcissism, different levels of analysis, and different situational conditions. Nonclinical participants (N = 196) completed baseline measures, followed by daily questionnaires for 28 days. Multilevel models indicated that trait and daily vulnerable narcissism, as well as trait neuroticism, were positively associated with daily shame. When controlling for vulnerable narcissism, trait grandiose narcissism was unrelated to shame, and daily grandiose narcissism was mostly negatively related to it. As for situations, social stress and workload were related to increased shame, especially in those high in trait neuroticism, or narcissism scales with neurotic content. Results highlight the key role of shame in pathological narcissistic functioning.     

No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate

Shame is considered a social emotion with action tendencies that elicit socially beneficial behavior. Yet, unlike other social emotions, prior experimental studies do not indicate that incidental shame boosts prosocial behavior. Based on the affect as information theory, we hypothesize that incidental feelings of shame can increase cooperation, but only for self-interested individuals, and only in a context where shame is relevant with regards to its action tendency. To test this hypothesis, cooperation levels are compared between a simultaneous prisoner's dilemma (where “defect” may result from multiple motives) and a sequential prisoner's dilemma (where “second player defect” is the result of intentional greediness). As hypothesized, shame positively affected proselfs in a sequential prisoner's dilemma. Hence ashamed proselfs become inclined to cooperate when they believe they have no way to hide their greediness, and not necessarily because they want to make up for earlier wrong-doing.     

Taking stock of the developmental literature on shame

Shame plays a central role in social and self development. This review presents an overview of the existing state of the developmental literature on shame, describing the major developmental theories of shame, research on the sources of individual differences in proneness to shame, and implications for mental and physical health. By toddlerhood, individual variations in proneness to shame emerge, and not long thereafter they are associated with psychological adjustment. Overall, evidence points to a variety of ways in which shame may be promoted, although much of it is correlational and based on retrospective reports by adults. Theory and research on the developmental consequences of proneness to shame indicate that it may be a vulnerability factor in the development of problems such as depression, aggression, social anxiety, and immune-related health problems. This also is correlational evidence and does not establish the etiological role of shame. To address the critical issues, an agenda for future research is outlined.     

Hidden shame

Shame dynamics, after decades of neglect, reappeared in psychoanalytic thinking with increasing prevalence in the last thirty years. Shame that is hidden is an aspect of complex clinical phenomenology that is particularly likely to be missed and hidden further by partial psychoanalytic explanations that drive shame more and more from view. Shame is often hidden theoretically by formulations limiting conflict to conflict between drives or impulses and something opposing them. By contrast, the incompatible idea model propounded by Freud in Studies on Hysteria emphasizes awareness incompatible with the dictates of conscience, and hence is broader in scope and closer to actual experience. Although shame and guilt arise developmentally earlier than does a true sense of morality, these emotions and their unconscious variants become entwined with the individual's sense of morality as development proceeds. The dynamics of shame and guilt are considerably more complex than their phenomenology as overt emotions. Shame emphasizes weakness, vulnerability, and the likelihood of rejection--so much so that its acknowledgment often generates more shame. Guilt, however, since it is action- and power-oriented, often obscures shame and so defends against it.     

Shame and the temporality of social life

Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger.     

Self-compassion Improves Parental Well-being in Response to Challenging Parenting Events

Shame and guilt are common during the course of parenting and can reflect feelings of “bad self “and “bad behaviour” in relation to parenting events. Self-compassion is known to be beneficial for well-being by reducing negative emotions, yet there is little research examining whether self-compassion might reduce parental guilt and shame. The current study examined the effects of dispositional and induced self-compassion on guilt and shame in a sample of 167 parents (Mage = 37.23, SD = 6.73, 83.1% female) of children ≤12?years recruited online. After completing baseline measures, parents were randomly assigned to recall a guilt versus shame provoking parenting event, and randomly allocated to either a self-compassion prompt versus a control condition. Analyses confirmed that those who received the self-compassion prompt reported higher levels of self-compassion, and reduced feelings of guilt and shame compared to the control group. Effects did not differ as a function of the guilt versus shame instructions. Multivariate analyses revealed that, when controlling for dispositional self-compassion, and baseline guilt and shame, differences between conditions were maintained for post-manipulation guilt and shame. Findings extend our understanding of the role of self-compassion for improving well-being when dealing with the challenges of parenting.     

20‐Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale: Do difficulties describing feelings assess proneness to shame instead of difficulties symbolizing emotions?

A hallmark of alexithymia is the difficulty putting emotional states into words which has to be differentiated from problems to communicate emotion to others. Shame proneness is a personality trait that is expected to be closely related to a reduced emotional self-disclosure in social interactions. The present investigation was conducted to examine construct validity of the Difficulties Describing Feelings scale of the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). The TAS-20 was administered to 68 subjects (30 psychiatric inpatients and 38 normals) along with the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), a direct measure of the ability to express feelings verbally, and the Shame-Guilt-Scale. Difficulties Describing Feelings was associated with shame assessing scales but not with guilt assessing scales or the LEAS. Thus, in view of our data one should be cautious in interpreting scores from the TAS-20 scale Difficulties Describing Feelings as indices of a difficulty to symbolize one's emotions. Instead, this TAS-20 scale seems to evaluate aspects of social shame.     

A New Measure of the Expression of Shame: The Shame Code

While shame is essential for adaptive functioning, experiencing shame more often or intensely than others is strongly associated with psychopathology. To date, no measure of the behavioral expression of shame exists, despite the great potential for use in research and clinical settings. The present study aimed to assess the Shame Code, a new behavioral coding system of the expression of shame. Participants included 149 youth between the ages of 12 and 17 (50?% female, M?=?14.5). Shame was elicited with a spontaneous speech task. Participants’ overall Shame Code scores were correlated only with a state measure of shame, however, structural equation modeling results showed that Shame Code variables combined differentially to assess state and trait shame scores. A two-factor model was the best fit to the data. The first factor, Fidget, consisted of Hiding, Fidget (positively loaded), Nervous Positive, and Stillness (negatively loaded). The second factor, Freeze, was comprised of Stillness, Facial Tension, and Silence (positively loaded). The Fidget factor was associated with higher Trait Shame and the Freeze factor was associated with higher State Shame but lower Trait Shame. Therefore, the Shame Code not only effectively captured the behavioral manifestations of shame, but Shame Code variables also differentially predicted state and trait shame.     

The Descent of Shame1

Shame is a painful emotion concerned with failure to live up to certain standards, norms, or ideals. The subject feels that she falls in the regard of others; she feels watched and exposed. As a result, she feels bad about the person that she is. The most popular view of shame is that someone only feels ashamed if she fails to live up to standards, norms, or ideals that she, herself, accepts. In this paper, I provide support for a different view, according to which shame is about failure to live up to public expectations. Such a view of shame has difficulties explaining why an audience is central to shame, why shame concerns the self as a whole, and why the social rank of someone affects their ability to shame others. These features, I argue, are best explained by reference to the descent of shame in the emotion connected with submission in nonhuman animals. The function of submission—to appease relevant social others—also throws light on the sort of emotion that shame is. From the point of view of other people, a subject who experiences shame at her own failing is someone who is committed to living together with others in a socially sanctioned way. The argument is not that we must understand the nature of shame in terms of what it evolved for, but that its heritage is important to understanding the emotion that shame has become.     

Restore and protect motivations following shame

Shame has been found to promote both approach and withdrawal behaviours. Shame theories have not been able to explain how shame can promote such contrasting behaviours. In the present article, the authors provide an explanation for this. Shame was hypothesised to activate approach behaviours to restore the threatened self, and in situations when this is not possible or too risky, to activate withdrawal behaviours to protect the self from further damage. Five studies with different shame inductions and different dependent measures confirmed our predictions. We therefore showed that different behavioural responses to shame can be understood in terms of restore and protect motives. Implications for theory and behavioural research on shame are discussed.     

Faces of Shame: Implications for Self-Esteem,Emotion Regulation,Aggression, and Well-Being

There is an increasing interest in psychological research on shame experiences and their associations with other aspects of psychological functioning and well-being, as well as with possible maladaptive outcomes. In an attempt to confirm and extend previous knowledge on this topic, we investigated the nomological network of shame experiences in a large community sample (N = 380; 66.1% females), adopting a multidimensional conceptualization of shame. Females reported higher levels of shame (in particular, bodily and behavioral shame), guilt, psychological distress, emotional reappraisal, and hostility. Males had higher levels of self-esteem, emotional suppression, and physical aggression. Shame feelings were associated with low self-esteem, hostility, and psychological distress in a consistent way across gender. Associations between characterological shame and emotional suppression, as well as between bodily shame and anger occurred only among females. Moreover, characterological and bodily shame added to the prediction of low self-esteem, hostility, and psychological distress above and beyond the influence of trait shame. Finally, among females, emotional suppression mediated the influence of characterological shame on hostility and psychological distress. These findings extend current knowledge on the nomological net surrounding shame experiences in everyday life, supporting the added value of a multidimensional conceptualization of shame feelings.