PRIDE
Even babies look happy when they accomplish what they set out to do. You can watch infant Johnny in his high chair, banging a metal cup, enthralled by the sound, ecstatically happy at his ability to make noise. Despite our opinion of the quality of the music produced by this little composer, we must recognize this particular expression of joy as the face of pride. Look again at our noisy little citizen and watch how his chest seems to swell in the moment of pleasure; how the child looks around with an exultant expression, as if certain that the world shares his joy; how the cup seems to linger at the top of its journey almost in the gesture of triumph we have come to associate with the raised arm of the triumphant adult.
This exultation involves the affect enjoyment–joy and should properly be considered as one of the named emotions in which that affect figures prominently. I define this feeling as one form of healthy pride—a normal emotion occurring in a rather specific situation, one that can be seen naturally and reproduced experimentally from earliest infancy throughout adult life. There are three conditions necessary for one to experience this sort of pride: (1) A purposeful, goal-directed, intentional activity is undertaken while under the influence of the affect interest–excitement; (2) this activity must be successful in achieving its goal; following which (3) the achievement of the goal suddenly releases the individual from the preceding effort and the affect that accompanies and amplifies it, thus triggering enjoyment–joy. In short, healthy pride involves what Broucek (1979) calls competence pleasure when our competence has been tested in an atmosphere of excitement. We can see it easily in three-or four-month-old infants. A baby old enough to try something “on purpose” is capable of feeling proud of its accomplishment.
How early does pride figure into human development? Tomkins points out that, as soon as the infant begins to imitate its own displays of innate affect by the process of autosimulation, it is performing actions intentionally. So powerful is the infant’s ability to sense, store, and match patterns that, when the child recognizes the correspondence between the feel of innately triggered affect display and its own self-mimicry, we can assume that it is rewarded by a burst of competence pleasure.
It is fascinating to watch how this competence or efficacy becomes integrated into our self-image, our personal identity. The self that can do things is my best self simply because it is the “me” most associated with excitement and joy. The competent self is the one that evokes the happiest memories. Later (once we have defined shame as rigorously as we now have identified interest and excitement), we will start to figure out how incompetence triggers shame, but already we know intuitively that failure is embarrassing. Since our memory of each experience is stored with the affects that accompanied it, the part of our identity associated with pride is the part we wish to show the world. That portion of us which is associated with shame must always be hidden. The joy in pride makes us public; for reasons we have yet to determine, shame makes us private.
Pride itself is infectious, both to the one who has suddenly experienced efficacy and to those watching. In the latter case, we tend to smile happily with the victor, thrilling at the victory, while in the former pride and the joy of conquest act as spurs to further action. A woman once confided that she had yielded to her husband’s entreaty to join him at skeet shooting, an activity she had earlier derided as violent and disgraceful. But after demonstrating a remarkable talent for the art of shattering clay discs with shotgun pellets, she said of this self-discovery, “I shot it right in the middle and now I’m hooked!” Throughout life, any experience in which personal efficacy is linked with a positive affect will produce healthy pride.
As most of us have experienced or observed, added to the adult sense of pride is a pleasant feeling of uniqueness and social distinction. Not only are we aware of having met or surpassed the standards we set for ourselves, but we feel that others share our pride and are happy for us. Somehow, then, pride moves from an individual experience, a solitary assessment of the self by the self, to a statement about the self-in-comparison-to-others. In the moment of pride I am willing to be—indeed, I want to be—seen and judged by my peers. This spirit of exultation is captured by the song from Sweet Charity, “If they could see me now . . . if my friends could see me now.” It is the song of justifiable, healthy pride.
Partly this happens because the positive innate affects form the basis for all socialization. Humans are built so that the intrinsically pleasant experiences of interest and contentment feel even better when shared. From the earliest moments of infancy we have enjoyed the mutualization of positive affect; efficacy is only one of many triggers to shareable joy. We look forward to sharing joy, and when we have a great deal of joy we look forward even more to sharing it. I suspect that family attitudes have a great deal to do with our expectations in such matters. Some parents maximize the display of joy by resonating with it and thus amplifying the experience, while others are embarrassed by it and stifle its expression. The healthier the family, the more likely it is that the child will anticipate a positive reaction to joy.
But there is a turning point in the life of the infant, a developmental milestone initially described by Amsterdam and Levitt in 1980, that has a great deal to do with the way pride and shame help us define ourselves in relation to others. All of a sudden, somewhere during the period from 18 to 24 months of age, the child will begin to behave in a way that makes us observers believe it has formed a new appreciation of its reflection in a mirror. Up to this time the child shows nothing more than interest in its reflection—whatever is mirrored there exists only as a source of novelty. Even if the baby recognizes this image as a representation of itself, it is a pleasant sort of recognition. But what happens next is quite another matter.
If you watch the child who is beginning to make this transition you notice that he or she studies the mirrored image with more care than before. An arm is moved, and its reflection analyzed. One has the feeling that the baby is saying, “Yes. This is my arm.” I have watched these children making faces in the mirror and then turning away with a look of perplexity. Often they turn away with the look of shame—eyes averted, head hung low as if all power had left the muscles of the neck. Some observers have called this the look of “painful self-awareness.” Broucek (1982) points out that this form of self-awareness is no more than shame, triggered now by the awareness that others see us much as we see ourselves. In a sense, it heralds the awareness that we are less private than we might have thought. Now the child knows that other people look at her just as attentively as she looks at them. Now the child becomes capable of true self-consciousness, an attribute that will influence the further development of the very public emotion of pride.
Success, especially success in an exciting venture, triggers joy; the pattern or sequence of these events is known to us as healthy pride. Along with this joy will come our memory of previous experiences of competence pleasure, making for some of the complex emotionality of pride. But accompanying it will also be our memory of how much we admired others who were successful at their goals, as well as a sense of triumph at having achieved a new level of competence by which we come closer to matching those we held dear as models for ourselves. We know also that others now admire us just as we once admired those who could do what we could not. At best, we will expect others to love us and to want contact with us just as we once wanted contact with those we admired. Pride is affiliative—it allows us to hoist the victors on our shoulders and share their triumph.
One of my patients entered a psychotherapy session brimming with pride over a recent accomplishment of her husband. “You’re proud of him, aren’t you,” I said. Her face relaxed into the smile of pure joy. Others can become a source of positive affect for us and, by our affiliation with them, a source of personal pride. We love it when our cherished teams or political candidates do well in their competitions. The increase in self-esteem granted us by their performance is another realm of pride.
Shame, of course, is the polar opposite of pride. Where pride allows us to affiliate with others, shame makes us isolate ourselves from them. All our actions are capable of being viewed along a shame/pride axis, a yardstick along which we measure our every activity. By this shame/pride axis we decide whether we have come closer to our hoped-for personal best or to our dreaded personal worst. Few of us have grown up with the habit of perpetual success, of easygoing self-assurance and uncomplicated personal pride. To the extent that we have grown to maturity in an atmosphere of incompetence and failure or have come to believe that our true self is a defective self, we have formed a personal identity based more on shame than pride. When this happens, anything that can give us a moment of pride is capable of acting as an antidote for what amounts to a chronic sense of shame.
What happens when our best efforts produce a result far better than we had any “right” to expect? In my youth an avid and quite mediocre golfer, I remember the day I hit a drive 314 yards—far, far longer than ever before or since. Immediately after this uncharacteristically athletic achievement I ran out to purchase an extremely expensive set of clubs, with which I never again hit the ball nearly as well. Contrast this anecdote with the story told me by a patient in therapy not long ago, an excellent golfer who hit a hole-in-one during a tournament. “God had blessed me,” he said. Whereas my youthful response to a moment of remarkable effectiveness had been to pretend that this unique event defined a more accomplished me, his solution was to attribute the event to divine intervention only little related to his own abilities.*
Arrogance, haughtiness, disdain for the accomplishments of others, jealousy, envy, and greed are only a few of the defensive attitudes and emotions that characterize those for whom self-awareness is more painful than pleasant. For those whose lives are ruled by shame, anything that can reduce the self-esteem of others can assist them to feel better about themselves in relation to those others.
Shame is not the only unpleasant emotion; it is not the only negative affect. We have much to take in before we can address shame and consider it as we have the two positive affects of interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy. We have yet to study the brief, inherently neutral affect Tomkins calls surprise–startle, and then the inherently negative innate affects of fear, distress, and anger. Then we will discuss the three “attenuators” of the affect system: dissmell and disgust, which limit our appetites, and shame, the built-in mechanism that attenuates the other affects. Let us turn first to the mechanism of surprise.
*Henry Murray, the great psychiatrist and founder of the discipline called Personology, referred to this tendency of humans to overvalue certain accomplishments as the Icarus effect.