Alleviating love’s rage: Hegel on shame and sexual recognition

ABSTRACT

The paper reconstructs Hegel’s account of shame as a fundamental (‘existential’) affect. Qua spiritual, the human individual strives for self-determination; hence she is ashamed of the fact that, qua bodily or natural, she is weak, vulnerable, and needy – namely, externally determined. Hegel approves of two typical responses to shame: (1) Reduction – the individual struggles for honour in civil society by disciplining her activity, including hiding potentially shameful features from others. Here, shame is reduced but remains a psychological burden. (2) Within marriage, however, shame is alleviated – the individual reveals shameful features to her lover and is recognized as a bodily, needy and vulnerable creature. I discuss two modes in which such recognition is manifested. First, since love is an ‘immediate unity’ – rather than governed by a rigid normative code – the spouses are implicated in each other’s failures, and, moreover, can creatively modify the significance of features, expressing their ‘infinite uniqueness’ by conferring positive value on what counts (in civil society) as shameful. The second mode is sexual intimacy: lovers affirm each other’s bodies by bodily, habituated – and therefore trustworthy – means.     

Working with chronic and relentless self‐hatred,self‐harm,and existential shame: a clinical study and reflections (Paper 2 of 2)

This second of two papers focuses on the shame which emerged in the first 14 years of analysis of a woman who was bulimic, self‐harmed, and repeatedly described herself as ‘feeling like a piece of shit’. To explore this intense and pervasive shame I draw on Jung's and Laplanche's emphasis on experiences of unresolvable, non‐pathological ‘foreignness’ or ‘otherness’ at the heart of the psyche. Images, metaphors, elements of clinical experience, and working hypotheses from a number of analytic traditions are used to flesh out this exploration. These include Kilborne's use of Pirandello's image of shame as like a ‘hole in the paper sky’ which, I suggest, points to a crack in subjectivity, and reveals our belief in the efficacy of the self to be illusory. Hultberg's observations on shame as having an existential mode (function) are also explored, as is the nature of analytic truth. Using these ideas I describe my patient's process of finding some small but freeing space in relation to her shame and self‐hatred. Through enduring and learning from her shame in analysis she realized that it was part of a desperate unconscious attempt to draw close to her troubled father and so to ‘love him better’.     

This White ‘I’: The Reciprocal Shame of Oppressor and Oppressed

Abstract

Vice’s answer to the question of this white ‘I’ who must try to live well in South Africa, configures shame, political silence and humble self-reconfiguration. I accept her insightful analysis of ‘whiteness’ in terms of the oppressor’s shame, but find that her specification of identity does not accommodate the multiplicity of privilege/oppression relations in which individuals participate. Since this implies that many South Africans, albeit unevenly, share the oppressor’s shame, her advice concerning ‘whites only’ political withdrawal seems inappropriate and curiously self-subversive. Focussing instead on her reflections concerning moral emotions in ethically-compromised selves, which should motivate self-reconfiguration, and drawing from Kristeva on ‘forgiveness’, I argue that compromised selves in privilege/oppression relations cannot reconfigure themselves independently, and should rather negotiate on-going forgiveness relationships. Further, since privileged and oppressed shoulder different but reciprocal ethical responsibilities, besides considering the privileged self who should appeal for forgiveness,¹ one must address a gap in Vice’s argument concerning the reciprocal shame of the oppressed.     

A Lover’s Shame

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed.     

The “Once and Future” Focus of a Relational Psychoanalysis: Discussion of “Vitalizing Enactment”

In this discussion of Amy Schwartz Cooney’s paper (this issue) I focus on the current interest in relational theorizing on the analyst’s proactive role vis-à-vis her patient, that is, what she actually does for or gives to her patient. I consider the role of the analyst’s own internal “bad” objects in facilitating or inhibiting the therapeutic process. I end with a set of theoretical propositions about the ways in which an intense and deadening shame can lead to dissociation and/or repression of hopeful fantasies about the future.     

Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses—Two Contrasting Interpretations for Moral Education

This paper offers a sustained philosophical meditation on contrasting interpretations of the emotion of shame within four academic discourses—social psychology, psychological anthropology, educational psychology and Aristotelian scholarship—in order to elicit their implications for moral education. It turns out that within each of these discourses there is a mainstream interpretation which emphasises shame’s expendability or moral ugliness (and where shame is typically described as guilt’s ugly sister), but also a heterodox interpretation which seeks to retrieve and defend shame. As the heterodox interpretation seems to offer a more realistic picture of shame’s role in moral education, the provenance of the mainstream interpretation merits scrutiny. I argue that social scientific studies of the concept of shame, based on its supposed phenomenology, incorporate biases in favour of excessive, rather than medial, forms of the emotion. I suggest ways forward for more balanced analyses of the nature, moral justification and educative role of shame.     

Dignity in Context,and Out: Discussion of Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity,a Sense of Dignity,and Inspirational Shame”

ABSTRACT

Dr. Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity, a Sense of Dignity, and Inspirational Shame” is an interdisciplinary integration of a priori ethics and a phenomenology of dignity. She contends that the human person’s engagement with other people—writ large in the therapeutic encounter—is inherently ethically situated. Moreover, she avers an inherent content to this ethics, namely, mutual respect for distinctively human value—dignity—between and among people. Her ethics of dignity informs her psychoanalytic exploration of experiences of dignity, indignity, and her notion of inspirational shame, among others. I join in Jacobs’ advocacy for therapeutic facilitation of a person’s sense of inherent worth, as well as her opposition to relational contexts of devaluation and degradation. However, the primordiality Jacobs grants to her ethics of dignity often obscures the constitutively cultural, familial, and personal contextuality of, first, her—and in my view, any—ethical conviction; second, what she describes as the experience of being human; third, the alleged indignity of human vulnerability; and finally, the claim that shame is the natural reaction to one’s failure to live up to personal ideals. In the end, and subject to certain clinical concerns, Jacobs’ article integrates into psychoanalysis primordial ethical duties that she and others claim inhere in us as human beings.     

小学儿童羞耻情绪理解能力的发展

先通过收集和验证羞耻情境故事和情绪词来编制考察小学儿童羞耻情绪理解能力的测量材料,然后对300名1-6年级小学儿童的羞耻情绪理解能力的发展特点进行测查。结果表明：（1）小学儿童的羞耻情绪理解能力随年级增长而发展,并且在2-3年级有一个快速发展阶段。（2）4种羞耻情境中,小学儿童在公德情境中的羞耻情绪理解能力最高,其次是当众出丑情境和欺骗情境,最低是学习情境。（3）小学儿童的羞耻情绪理解能力无显著性别差异;4种羞耻情境中,只有在公德情境中的羞耻情绪理解能力有显著性别差异,即男生高于女生。     

Reconstructing Indian feminine self: A case study of Devaki

This essay addresses the applicability of life history as a genre and method to explore culture and self. It looks at how various aspects of culture and society contribute actively to emergence of cultural self, social self and psychological self. The psychological biography of child widow, Devaki from Banaras explores these concerns. A Hindu widow is known for the traumatic rites of passage she goes through from marriage to widowhood. In the case of child widow her adolescence gets enmeshed, with that of the rites of widowhood. She experiences embodiment of shame and ritual pollution along with economic hardships and social marginality. Devaki’s efforts are steered in the direction of releasing herself from the shame that, envelopes her being, and then her emergence as an independent self. The essay also explores possibility of multiple selves.     

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.     

The effect of shame on anger at others: awareness of the emotion-causing events matters

Numerous studies have found that shame increases individuals’ anger at others. However, according to recent theories about the social function of shame and anger at others, it is possible that shame controls individuals’ anger at others in specific conditions. We replicated previous findings that shame increased individuals’ anger at others’ unfairness, when others were not aware of the individual’s experience of shameful events. We also found for the first time that shame controlled or even decreased individuals’ anger at others’ unfairness, when others were aware of the individual’s experience of shameful events. The results were consistent when shame was induced by either a recall paradigm or an imagination paradigm, and in either the ultimatum game or the dictator game. This suggests that shame strategically controls individuals’ anger at others to demonstrate that they are willing to benefit others, when facing the risk of social exclusion. Our findings highlight the interpersonal function of shame and deepen the understanding of the relationship between shame and anger at others.     

Shame,Belonging, and Biopolitics: Agamben Among the Phenomenologists

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s (at times rather confusing) terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging.     

Sugar and Spice: Competitiveness,Envy and Shame in Women’s Relationships - Discussion of “With Friends Like These”

Barth’s (this issue) thoughtful article draws our attention to the ubiquity and dangers of competitiveness in women’s relationships. She highlights the tension between women’s desires to be nurturing and supportive of one another, and their discomfort with being competitive with and envious of one another. In responding to Barth, I address three aspects of her article. The first is the broader sociopolitical context in which women compete. The second is the need to delineate the complex and important differences between competition and envy, which are so often linked but are essentially quite different emotional states. I explore the role of shame as an underpinning of envy. Third, I take up Barth’s comment regarding traditional psychoanalytic technique being employed by the analyst as defensive maneuver.     

大学生羞耻和内疚差异的对比研究

以 48名北京大学本科生为被试 ,检验羞耻和内疚差异的 3种假设 :研究一同时检验“公开化与私人化”和“个人无能与违背道德”两个假设 ;研究二检验“伤害自我与伤害他人”假设。方法是依次呈现一系列不同的负性情境 (情境事先已按要检验的假设加以控制 ) ,要求被试设想自己亲身经历该情境 ,然后回答体验到的羞耻和内疚的程度及理由。结果表明 :①“公开化与私人化”对羞耻和内疚的影响有显著差异 (p <0 0 5 ) :“有他人在场”可以易化羞耻 ,而内疚感的产生一般不需要“观众”在场。②“违背道德”在引发羞耻和内疚感上基本相等 ,而“个人无能”引起更多的羞耻感 (p <0 0 1)。③“公开化与私人化”和“个人无能与违背道德”的交互作用不显著。④“伤害自我”更多引起羞耻感 (p <0 0 5 ) ,而“伤害他人”更多引起内疚感 (p <0 0 1)。     

Piper’s question and ours: a role for adversity in group-centred views of non-agentive shame

This paper aims to contribute to ‘group-centred views’ of non-agentive shame (victim shame, oppression shame), by linking them to an ‘anepistemic’ model of the experience and impact of human failing. One of the most vexing aspects of those group-centred views remains how susceptivity to such shame ought to be understood. This contribution focuses on how a basic familiarity with adversity, in everyday life, may open individuals up to these forms of shame. If, per group-centred views, non-agentive shame is importantly driven by participation in social practices with others, a better understanding of the impact of adversity on individuals’ lives may offer a way of explaining how embodied experience instils in individuals a need for such participation. The upshot is an understanding of the individual’s susceptivity to non-agentive shame, which affords it the same legitimacy as more conventional notions of shame.

     

Moral Psychology of Shame in Early Confucian Philosophy

In Western philosophy and psychology, shame is characterized as a self-critical emotion that is often contrasted with the similarly self-critical but morally active emotion of guilt. If shame is negative concern over endangered or threatened self-image (usually in front of others), guilt is autonomous moral awareness of one’s wrongdoings and reparative motivation to correct one’s moral misconduct. Recently, many psychologists have begun to discuss the moral significance of shame in their comparative studies of non-Western cultures. In this new approach, shame is characterized as a positive moral emotion and active motivation for self-reflection and self-cultivation. If shame is a positive and active moral emotion, what is its moral psychological nature? In this paper, I will analyze shame from the perspective of cultural psychology and early Confucian philosophy. Unlike many Western philosophers, Confucius and Mencius discuss shame as a form of moral excellence. In early Confucian texts, shame is not a reactive emotion of an endangered self but a moral disposition that supports a self-critical and self-transformative process of moral development.     

中学生学业羞愧:测量、生理唤醒及其与学业成绩的关系

测量中学生学业羞愧情绪,探讨诱发学业羞愧时的生理唤醒及其与学业成绩的关系。调查191名中学生学业羞愧体验和情境基础上,用自编的中学生学业羞愧问卷从292名施测中学生中选取34人作为高分组,30人为低分组,使用16导生理记录仪记录他们产生学业羞愧和自豪情绪时的生理变化;又从347名施测中学生中选取问卷得分前后各20%的学生,比较问卷得分高低组的学业成绩,然后又将他们的成绩分段计算了学业羞愧问卷得分与学业成绩之间的关系。结果表明:中学生学业羞愧问卷具有较好的信效度;学业羞愧有较明显的生理唤醒;学业成绩较好和最好的学生体验到较多的学业羞愧。未来研究应注意学业羞愧对学生行为、学业成绩等影响的相关因素,发挥羞愧的积极作用。