Sartre and Fanon: The Phenomenological Problem of Shame and the Experience of Race

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that existing accounts of shame are incomplete in so far as they don’t take account of the problem of shame. This is the problem concerning the possibility of a primary experience of shame. It is the problem Sartre considers under the terms of a “primitive shame” or shame “in its primary structure” that grounds other more complex experiences of shame. This problem is centred on the tension between shame as an immediate, pre-reflective experience and the requirement that shame must involve an awareness of some definitive aspect of the self. I’m going to suggest, correlatively, how by trying to resolve this problem we end up with a more nuanced understanding of shame. In the second part of the paper, I go on to look at how this new interpretation of shame helps us understand race. Looking at Fanon, I explore how a fundamental and overlooked ineffability in our relation to others impacts upon responses to racialized shame.     

The Ethics Code Does Not Equal Ethics: A Response to O’Donohue

ABSTRACT

O’Donohue has identified 37 criticisms of the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (Ethics Code), although many of his criticisms go far beyond what is found written in the APA Ethics Code, to include the process of adjudicating ethics complaints by the American Psychological Association Ethics Committee, and the process by which the Ethics Code was developed. The authors claim that a major shortcoming of O’Donohue’s article is that he adopted an unrealistically expansive role for the Ethics Code that was not clearly linked to furthering the goals of the ethics code revision.