Shame and the Self

Abstract

Gilligan points to the nexus of shame, helplessness and violence to the mind, linked to experiences of violence and helplessness in early life. While shame motivates behaviour that defends against further experience of helplessness, I argue that shame first comes into being as a psychical mechanism protecting the individual from the existential anxiety attending the loss of the capacity to think. The mind’s capacity for thought is constitutively fragile; when it is threatened so too is the coherence of the sense of self, and this provokes a deep anxiety which is unavailable to consciousness but may be discerned in the psychoanalytic setting. Philosophical analysis of the nature of shame, together with psychoanalytic object relations theory, show how shame has the defensive function of making such existential anxiety over into a form that can be represented in thought by making intelligible the underlying fear of the loss of self. The subject’s capacity for thinking is saved, at the expense of a reduced and exiguous sense of self. The shamed self thus preserves itself by misrepresenting an existential anxiety that is object-less, as a persecutory anxiety that entails existence as a dependent subjectivity, in the eyes of a shaming other.