Shame and Pride

DEXTERITY AND SKILL

It is not merely our tiny size that makes us helpless as infants. The long period of childhood, of utter dependence on others for basic care, is one during which we mature from thrashing, squalling little beings into competent adults capable of precise manipulation of complicated equipment. An infant, facing the computer terminal at which I write, would bang the keyboard with open hand—perhaps delighted at its success in hitting whole groups of keys—but it would be simply unable to address them one at a time. Even were the infant able to understand the logic involved in typing, it would be incapable of utilizing the machinery involved.

Newborn monkeys are able to clamber about the body of their mother while searching for her breast and can hold firmly to her fur while nursing. Human babies are less dexterous, for it seems there is a law of inverse ratios in evolution. The more advanced an organism, the less competent it is at birth and the longer it takes to mature into a fully developed adult. In the human, mastery of motor movements occurs over a predictable schedule. First we gain control over the large muscle groups needed for crawling and walking. Some many months afterwards we are capable of learning how to control fine motor movements and integrating the operation of hands and fingers.

Each developmental acquisition is by definition a new ability, each the source of pride for the growing child. Any time the child can plan an activity and accomplish it, that moment of efficacy will be experienced with pride. Parental pleasure at the child’s growing competence adds to the storehouse of attributes linked to the pride experienced when we have made others happy.

Studying the ability of infants to plan actions and to assess the effects of their actions, one group of investigators set up a clever experiment. The husband and wife team of Papoušek and Papoušek (1975) took a group of three- to four-month-old infants and exposed them to five-second bursts of multicolored light situated off to one side. As we might expect, the babies treated this novel stimulus as a source of interest and turned toward it. Naturally, the novelty soon wore off, and after a while they began to lose interest in the lights.

But the experimenters had built another trick into the system. Any time a baby turned its head toward the light display more than 30 degrees and repeated this motion three times, the exciting display would be turned on. In other words, the experiment rewarded the baby for a specific piece of behavior. Apparently the babies loved it. Their behavior changed dramatically! As soon as they learned that certain repetitive gestures could bring on the light display, they became tremendously interested in this new activity and kept trying to repeat what now became a skill. Accompanying the actual movements of head rotation were squeals of joy when success greeted their efforts. As I have indicated earlier, this “competence pleasure” is what I believe to be one of the major sources of the complex adult emotion we call healthy pride.

Now the Papoušeks added a twist. On occasion they let the infant demonstrate its expertise—three purposeful rotations of the head in quick succession—but followed these actions by no rewarding burst of pretty lights. What happened next was fascinating. Most of the babies exhibited a sudden loss of muscle tone in the head and neck, slumping and turning their faces away from the now problematic situation. They seemed for all the world to be suddenly confused and uncoordinated. Their faces showed discomfort, their breathing intensified, and the blood flow to the skin increased.

The observers who set up the experiment understood that this moment of frustration had upset their subjects. It was Broucek (1982) who reinterpreted this data to explain it as an episode of primitive shame experience. Behavior performed in order to achieve a known pattern of events, an action that might reasonably be expected to produce its usual sequence of interest, effort, efficacy, enjoyment, and pride, now produced an unexpected pattern. This acted as an impediment to both interest and enjoyment, and triggered shame affect, which in turn decreased the infant’s interest in further involvement with the experimental situation.

I have described this experiment in some detail in order to make another point that is critically important to our understanding of shame. Throughout the experimental situation these babies were not involved with other people. This is an example of shame affect triggered in the clear absence of a relationship. Because the mature, adult emotion of shame is seen predominantly in the context of an interpersonal relationship, and indeed becomes one of the basic monitors of all social functioning, many sober investigators have assumed that shame is at core a social emotion. It is not. The social function of shame is merely one possible assembly of shame affect, even though it is the assembly by which we know it best.

Again, we come back to my analogy to the family of chemicals known as chlorides. Chlorine can bleach clothing whiter than white. If you are going to recycle paper, chlorine bleaches will return even the grubbiest newsprint to shiny white. But the cancer-producing dioxins that leach out of the paper into our environment are also chlorides. Wouldn’t we be foolish to restrict our understanding of chlorine to the study of table salt? It is the same for shame. Any time the affect system detects an impediment it is capable of engaging the attenuator called shame affect. The infant who blushes and becomes suddenly disorganized when unable to turn on a display of colored lights is neither embarrassed nor humiliated by this failure. It is in the grip of shame affect pure and simple, an affect mechanism that functions to suppress the excitement and enjoyment normally attending the exercise in progress.

I have come to believe that most of the time people complain that they are “confused” they are really describing an episode of shame affect. Even when we are reading or studying, paying attention to thought-provoking material, we have assembled some advanced neocortical function (a learned skill) with the affect interest–excitement. The very act of studying, or of trying intentionally to master new material, involves us in situations where we know ahead of time we do not understand the material. This sense of “difficultness,” of complexity, is an acceptable quality inherent to the task we have taken on. But at the moment we feel daunted by this material, even momentarily unable to comprehend what we feel certain is within our range of abilities, shame affect is triggered to produce its painful interference with the positive affect that only a moment ago had powered our study.

Shame can attach to the very idea of a task, impeding further attempt at its completion; alternatively, shame can bring with it the resolve to work at a task until the achievement of mastery. Much depends on the way we are brought up and on biological, constitutional factors we understand poorly. But any time we take on something new we court pride and risk shame in the service of comprehension.

Occasionally we are able to break away from this temporary alteration of our mood, to decenter ourselves and pay attention to the emotion accompanying the confusion. (One must be fairly mature and centered to do this.) And on these occasions we may become aware that we are indeed embarrassed by our failure to comprehend the subject of our attention. But more often—indeed, most of the time—all we know is that we feel uncomfortably confused. Check this out the next time somebody comes to you with a question about something perplexing. I’ll bet they address you with head somewhat bowed and turned to the side, shaking the head from side to side, saying “I don’t get this.” Although the stated complaint is about confusion, the broadcast affective message is about shame. Any failure of mastery produces shame.

Then, too, any time we wish to decrease the shame that accompanies our awareness that a task is daunting, we can merely make a (cognitive) decision to reduce the level of our interest in that activity. The ubiquity of this culturally sanctioned method of shame reduction may be adduced by inspection of the classical fable of the fox and the grapes. Daunted each time he attempts to snatch an apparently delectable bunch of grapes, the fox walks away with haughty pride, rather than shame and dejection, saying, “They were sour, anyway.”

A patient gave another example of this process recently: Successful in every area of her life except the quest for a new husband, she reported meeting a man whose presentation of self excited her to feverish interest. Swiftly she located a mutual friend, who provided his telephone number, and prepared to call him. In the theater of her mind she previewed each possible outcome of her call, dwelling with terrible intensity on each imaginable form of rejection. The sheer mass of anticipated humiliation proved too daunting, and she decided not to place the call that evening.

Next day she was a bit less excited about the prospect of dating this man, saying, “I was much more in control of myself.” Again she devised artistic scenarios of failure, but noticed that the humiliation was of lesser intensity in each. By the third day she noted neither an anticipation of rejection nor any significant interest in calling the man who had innocently sparked this three-day torture. There can be no shame in the absence of interest or enjoyment. To the extent that avoidance of shame is a central issue for any individual, reduction of interest will be a sturdy defense against shame.

Yet without interest life is dull. Adult patients who describe their experience of depression often say that nothing interests them. I understand the job of the clinician as the challenge of figuring out what has caused this decreased ability to trigger interest–excitement. Sometimes we use medication to return toward normal an aberration in neurotransmitter physiology deemed responsible for the perceived alteration of normal mood. But equally often we find that interest has been withdrawn in an effort to diminish the expectation of shame, and therapy is designed around this realm of causation.

In the world of infants, massive withdrawal of interest is called “apathy.” The skilled clinician who sees an apathetic baby asks first whether the child has been presented with sources of novelty adequate to trigger interest, and then looks for the kind of disordered affective interaction that an infant might handle by withdrawal. An apathetic infant cannot learn, cannot advance properly in development, for the mastery of any skill will be proportional to the affective charge that makes it urgent.

There are so many skills to master. Children initially unable to grasp objects by any other means than simple reflex action will learn to hold their bottle, grip a cup, bang a cup, drink from a cup, grip a spoon, bang a spoon, eat from a spoon, master the intricacies of knife and fork, punch the buttons of calculators, telephones, and computers, drive a car, operate video games, handle a myriad of sports-related equipment, and even grow up to become neurosurgeons operating on structures so delicate they can only be seen under a microscope. The mastery of every skill involves the affect-driven wish to be more skillful; it means that growing people must not only visualize themselves doing a new task but also deal with the affect generated by the performance of that task. Even when the behavior to be learned is initially a matter of chance or random occurrence, both the desire to emulate it and the actions of autosimulation require some sequence of affects.

Clumsiness is about shame, grace is about pride. Generations of moviegoers loved Fred Astaire because he made grace look easy. For a few moments we could look up at the silver screen and pretend we were Fred and Ginger, dancing on chairs, making the intricate look simple. Right after we saw Fred Astaire we felt like dancing out of the theater. For a moment or so (until, once again, we saw our “real” natural level of skill), we were transformed into creatures beyond our regular selves. You prefer tennis or golf to dancing? Then I am willing to bet that you align your movements to those of the stars you watch on television, and that you play your best game right after seeing a major tournament. For those few moments that we are able to identify with someone more skillful or more graceful at least until some impediment to positive affect returns us to our accustomed place on the shame/pride axis, we live and operate at a higher level of self-esteem and self-confidence.

Trial and error are not moves made by a logical machine devoid of feeling. The very concept of skill is immutably locked to matters of shame and pride. Throughout life, from infancy to senescence, our dexterity will bring us pride and our incompetence will trigger shame. Indeed, to the extent that the courage to experiment depends on interest and the failure of any undertaking triggers shame, the entire system of learning by trial and error will be limited by our attitude toward shame. As we grow from nurslings to nurses, from crib-bound curiosity seekers to scientists in spaceships, increases and decreases in dexterity and skill will be powerful stimuli for pride and shame.

Nowhere is this as easily seen and studied as in the infant’s struggles to develop control over the process of excretion. Standards for the accomplishment of these skills have changed greatly during the past few decades, and the enlightened parent of today places much less pressure on a child than in years past. Nevertheless, so much shame and pride are associated with these activities that it is no wonder that Freud mistook the child’s attention to them as a sign that excretion bore some intrinsic relation to the sexual drive system. The link between sexuality and excretion is that both activities trigger or are closely associated with excitement, enjoyment, and shame. But not in the way he thought.

What really happens when the child learns the sociology of excretion? Try, if you can, to visualize the plight of a baby whose otherwise doting caregivers (people who can be counted on for the rewarding mutualization of the calming smile of enjoyment and the increasing energy of excitement) begin to exhibit the rejecting face of dissmell or disgust for no discernible reason. Imagine smiling up to greet mother only to encounter an unexpected distortion of her features. Where only a moment ago the face of mother could be counted on for the pleasure of gestural communion, suddenly she presents a serious impediment to the child’s expression of interest or enjoyment. Very little can convince a child to “lose interest” in mother. This is a perfect example of a situation in which shame affect is triggered to produce its painful interference with positive affect.

As the face of the infant turns away from mother and its head droops in shame, the baby becomes momentarily disorganized and uncoordinated. What happens next is fascinating, and I have observed countless variations of this group of scenes. Most often, mother’s concern for her child replaces or overrides her dissmell and disgust at its excretions. Usually she smiles at her baby, who now finds no impediment to the resonance of positive affect and returns from the shame experience, although perhaps a bit warily. Occasionally the mother, herself in a “bad mood” and unwilling to let the baby off the hook for its transgression, remains unavailable for pleasurable communion. This amplifies the severity of the preceding rejection; frequently, the now dissmelling or disgusting baby moves from shame to distress and begins to cry.

Earlier, I emphasized the importance of dissmell and disgust as mechanisms that do not turn off the hunger drive but prevent it from allowing us to seek satisfaction from specific substances. Now consider how it might feel to find that you yourself have become the trigger for these affects of total rejection, rejection by the person whose loving attention is necessary for life. Thus, the significance to that child of having been the stimulus for dissmell or disgust will be proportional to the baby’s ability to form linkages between events, to store the memories of these events, and to retrieve this information for comparison with new data (in other words, proportional to the child’s level of cognitive maturity).

From this point a number of interactions are possible. Mothers, of course, differ greatly in the degree of comfort they feel with each negative affect. Some will scoop up their child and smother it with kisses, attempting to undo the rift in the relationship. Others will take this opportunity to admonish the hapless infant about the sins of soiling, thus reinforcing its distress. For some mothers, it is the very presence of excreta that has precipitated their own negative affect—mother’s personal reaction to the substances involved. For other mothers, the presence of feces or urine has a more symbolic meaning. Soiled diapers can tell her, for instance, that the baby is still a baby and not adult enough, thus placing the mother in invidious comparison with whatever standards are important to her. In such a situation, the baby has become a source of shame to the mother, the stimulus for her own personal responses to a source of shame.

The infant is unable at first to understand that it is the presence of feces or urine that has precipitated maternal disfavor. Depending on the age of the child, which will determine the type of thinking process by which it will try to solve the problems thus presented, there are a number of solutions for the now problematic interaction with mother. I will discuss these modes of thinking in a later section; for the moment I wish only to point out that children are not really able to understand the logic of toilet training until somewhere in the third year of life. Their reactions to our concerns about bowel and bladder control are based more on the affective interactions involved than on any real comprehension of the reasons for our concern. Eventually the baby learns to link the process of excretion to its magnetic ability to attract parental negative affect, and excretory control becomes a major realm of competence pleasure and failure shame.

There has been much scholarly debate about the nature of the human dissmell and disgust responses to feces and urine. Most people take for granted that our aversion to these substances is “natural” and biologically programmed. For a long time I have wondered when that particular group of programs was written. I know no other animal with such an aversion—dogs, for example, lower their eyebrows and wag their tails with great interest in the presence of excreta, from which they seem to derive a great deal of information. My pet Gordon Setter, bred as a hunting dog, routinely tastes rabbit droppings unless one of us humans is adequately repulsed by this otherwise normal appetite. Every dog owner knows the avidity with which a male dog sniffs fire hydrants to determine which neighbors have left their olfactory calling cards. There is never a trace of negative affect in the canine response to excreta. I have observed horses, cows, goats, rhinoceri, elephants, giraffes, lions, monkeys, and chimpanzees without finding any evidence of such a prewired aversion.

In the era before modern chemistry, a physician would taste the patient’s urine in order to determine the presence or absence of sugar. There was literally no other way to make the diagnosis of diabetes. Actually, there are two groups of illnesses characterized by raging thirst and copious urination—diabetes mellitus, with sweet urine, and diabetes insipidus, in which urine has no taste. Despite my years of reading ancient medical texts, I have never seen any instruction to the physician that indicates the need to overcome an inherent aversion to the tasting of urine. It would seem that our societal dissmell and disgust for these natural substances are examples of cultivated triggers for innate affect rather than innately programmed triggers.

Often I have heard patients in psychotherapy discuss their attitude toward excretion and their discomfort over the way they were toilet trained. Rarely have I ever heard anybody discuss aversion to fecal odors—either their own or those of others—outside of the context of embarrassment. Rather, it seems that such aversion is learned, and learned as a strategy for the avoidance of shame. Stated more bluntly, I believe that all aversion to excreta is shame related.

One more item of interest: Return again to that fascinating change in the infant that takes place as it passes into the third year, one that we discussed briefly in our section on pride. Somewhere in the period between 18 and 24 months of age, the child develops a radically different reaction to its own reflection in a mirror. Until this remarkable developmental acquisition, the baby it sees in the mirror is only another baby—a competent trigger for interest. But now, somewhere during this six-month period of time, the child begins to respond to the baby-in-the-mirror quite differently. Almost universally, babies of this age begin to act shy around their own reflection!

Amsterdam and Levitt (1980), who first demonstrated this phenomenon, called it “painful self-awareness” and thought it was one of the earliest manifestations of shame. Broucek (1982), using the more sophisticated analysis made possible by Tomkins’s affect theory, reevaluated their data. Knowing that the shame affect triggered in the toddler is no different from the shame affect triggered in infants, he pointed out that the two-year-old had developed the ability to understand that it could be the object of other people’s awareness. If the person I see in the mirror is me, reasons the child, then other people, any other people who look at me, see me exactly as I am in that mirror.

Broucek’s elegant term for this is objective self-awareness, by which he means that we are no longer merely the subject of our own musings but the object of the scrutiny of others. This developmental milestone, he reasons, brings with it a shame crisis for every child. Until this moment, the shame that could occur in a host of situations involving impediments to positive affect bore no necessary relation to the eye of another person. Now we become susceptible to another whole realm of situations in which we can experience shame! It is from this moment forth that we are able to be embarrassed because someone else sees us or learns something about us.

You will, of course, have noticed that the period in question, the 18-to-24-month era of child development, is right around the time that (in our culture) most families decide to potty-train their children. So it appears that just when most families concentrate on excretory control, the child is going through the shame crisis of objective self-awareness. This forges an immutable link between excretion and shame. Right at the time children are made aware of the degree to which their families are displeased at their excretory habits, they have newly become aware that much they thought was private, or secret, was really public. This new propensity for shame causes a radical magnification of the importance of toilet training.

In a culture that venerates cleanliness and abhors “filth,” toilet training is a condition necessary for membership. To a certain extent, more for some of us than for others, the shame and pride associated with the achievement of the specific skills needed to produce excretory competence come to take on great importance in our definition of ourselves as individuals. A three-year-old might introduce himself to us with pride by saying, “My name is Johnny and I can go to the bathroom all by myself!” No adult would even think of saying aloud so ridiculous a thought—indeed, even the idea itself may be a bit embarrassing to some readers. Put it another way: It is nearly unthinkable for an adult to be incompetent in the arena of excretion.

Actually, loss of excretory control in adults is more common than you might imagine, and just as embarrassing as you might fear. Many women suffer a reduction in bladder control both during and after pregnancy. I remember particularly the agony of a young lawyer in her eighth month of pregnancy who had misjudged the amount of time it would take her to return home from a trip to the shopping mall and found herself unbearably close to losing control of her bladder. Screeching her car to a stop in her own driveway, she ran toward the house only to realize she could not get to the toilet in time. “Just like a dog,” she said, covering her face in her hands, “I crouched down on the lawn and peed. And that wasn’t the worst of it. I could see my next-door neighbor looking at me from her window. I still haven’t been able to face her since that day.” We talked at length about her self-disgust and the shame that it has caused.

Often I have lectured and written about the perplexing fact that embarrassment is more and better discussed in the entertainment media than in psychotherapy. It is fascinating to note how much advertising depends on shame. We tend not to “notice” advertisements that have nothing to do with us—or, more properly, that speak to sources of shame we have never encountered in our own lives. Men tend not to remember technical details about brassieres, women have little or no awareness that jockstraps and jockey shorts help reduce the visibility of erections and thus are favored over boxer shorts by younger men.

So unless you are sensitive to the problems associated with the loss of excretory control normal to an aging population, you may not have paid much attention to the ubiquitous television and print advertisements that describe the advantages of diaperlike garments for older folk, or products that help control odor and leakage from colostomy and ileostomy pouches. Every one of these products and every advertisement for each such commodity are about the shame that accompanies loss of excretory control in the adult.

Equally interesting is the fact that these advertisements only attract the attention of people who have experienced shame because of their newfound lack of skill in the management of excretion. Just as shame produces a painful impediment in interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy, anything that reduces or relieves shame becomes suddenly interesting or enjoyable.

So much are we stigmatized by our own failure to control excretion that one way we attempt to create shame in others is to curse at them using language that indicates such lack of self-jurisdiction in them. As a beginning student of psychotherapy, I was taught that the frequency with which “four-letter words” appear in conversation is an index of unconscious anger. It seems much more likely that whatever anger appears in one who curses is some form of reaction to the experience of ridicule or put-down. The investigation of spoken invective is very much the study of shame and pride.

As an indication of this, examine, for a moment, the relation between curse words and shame. “Bad” words are usually related to excretion or to matters of genitals, gender identity, and sexuality. We’ll get to the latter in the section about the relation between shame and sex, but for now let’s concentrate on the reasons we insult people by using the terms of excretion. Why do we label people with such epithets as “asshole,” “shit,” “pisser,” and so on? Even more interesting, why do people get upset when we fling these terms at them?

By now it should be clear that all of them refer to matters that become part of our system of self-esteem quite early in development. What we have learned so far serves to explain what Wurmser pointed out: in the moment of embarrassment we feel infantile, weak, dirty, and unable to control our bodily functions. Again, this observation serves to demonstrate the differences between affect and emotion as we now define them. No matter what kind of impediment to positive affect triggers shame affect, memory brings forth our history of previous experiences of shame. The self-disgust and self-dissmell associated with excretory dyscontrol are so powerful a stimulus for shame, triggers that come to matter so much to the growing child, that excretory competence becomes a kind of reference point within our construct of shame as an emotion. Shame, of course, is about much more than just excretion, but excretory epithets are about shame.

When you study human development in terms of the affect system, the emotions associated with control of urination and defecation are easily understood as derivatives of the three painful affects of attenuation. The skills involved are hard-won by the growing child. Indeed, it is the shame and pride associated with the achievement of these particular skills that make their accomplishment so important. It is the peculiar timing of the demands we place on the child that give them such unique importance in the formation of these emotions.

Much more happens during this period than the battles of the bathroom. And there are a myriad of skills on which we might lavish similar attention. But it is time to discuss other vectors of development, other systems that change as we mature and that become involved in the complex world of shame and pride.