THE SELF
“Look at me,” said the young boxer from Lexington, Kentucky. “I am beautiful. I am the greatest. I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Look at this face. Nobody has ever touched this face. I am beautiful.” He mocked his opponents in doggerel verse, predicting (correctly) the round in which they would fall.
I was deeply offended by the arrogance, the “narcissism” of Cassius Clay, later Mohammed Ali, and disliked him intensely in those early years. How could anyone ever have the effrontery to say such things aloud? When, for religious reasons, he refused to “fight for his country” I thought him insincere. After all, wasn’t fighting in war the same as fighting in the prize ring? What a narcissistic character, I thought. He should be ashamed of himself for such behavior!
A simple, chance observation permanently altered my understanding of this great athlete. Watching one of his fights on television a couple of years later, I saw him make a series of three right jabs in astonishingly quick succession—effortless blows executed with a combination of speed and power no one else could have achieved. I had been studying Okinawan Kempo Ru karate at the time and (even as a beginner) knew enough about the martial arts to recognize from his technique what I had disavowed, refused to accept about his person: Mohammed Ali was the greatest. He was beautiful. And it was true that nobody touched his face.
It was only his way of speaking about himself that so “turned me off” that I prejudged him, that I was temporarily unable to give him the respect he deserved. What is it about self-praise that offends or alarms the listener?
Clicking through the television dial one day some years ago, running the channels in hope of entertainment, I was arrested by one of the sweet-voiced, acid-tongued Hollywood interviewers’ asking Alan Alda, “You don’t have anything nasty to say about anybody, you aren’t here to push a cause—why did you come on my show?” He answered with quiet intensity, “I have just completed the two best films of my career. The Seduction of Joe Tynan is about a good man, a senator who falls from grace and has to rethink his life; and The Four Seasons is about the changes that take place in the lives of a group of friends. I am very proud of this work and I wanted to tell people about it so they would see it.” What impressed me was his quiet pride. Why wasn’t he embarrassed to laud his own work? Shouldn’t such things only be said by others? All my training had led me to expect that he was bragging, that this was narcissism; yet what I heard sounded healthy and enlightened. I saw both movies and loved them—he was right that they represented his best work, and I was left with admiration for his ability to say that aloud.
In the Hall of History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington is an exhibit about colonial life. Large and proud, on a plaque in front of a realistic grouping of tools, is this statement, written in 1784 by a New Jersey farmer and tavernkeeper: “I am a mover, a shoemaker, furrier, wheelwright, farmer, gardener, and, when it can’t be helped, a soldier. I make my bread, brew my beer, kill my pigs; I grind my axes and knives; I built those stalls and that shed there; I am barber, leech, and doctor.” What are we to make of this calm, confident self-appraisal? Is it shameless or arrogant? Does it contain what the Greeks called hubris, the sin of pride? Or is it (as I believe) merely healthy self-reflection?
Deems Taylor, a composer who achieved fame in later life as a radio personality, once told the following anecdote about his friend Arturo Toscanini, arguably the greatest orchestral and operatic conductor of their era. “We were standing together after a concert, and a middle-aged woman came up to him and gushed, ‘Maestro Toscanini, you looked so handsome tonight!’ He thanked her politely, and after she left, he turned to me and said, ‘That woman made me very happy. No one can tell Toscanini how well he conducted.’” This is another sort of self-appraisal.
Yet here, from the artist Jonathan Borofsky, is a public statement of more negative self-appraisal. Perhaps you have seen an exhibit of his work—paintings and sculptures covered with numbers. Borofsky has filled countless notebooks with numbers, since childhood scribbled numbers in the millions over every scrap of paper available to him. To a psychiatrist it would appear either that he had developed the defense of obsessive counting in order to drive away bad thoughts or that he suffers from some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. One way or another, he has turned into art what appears to be either madness or a defense against madness.
A lithograph, a print sold in art galleries not long ago, contained no drawings (and no numbers) but only the following hand-lettered words, copied here exactly as he wrote them: “I don’t like where I’m at now (that I’m not perfect) and instead I want to be there (God state) now. I don’t want to work for this because I know deep down inside that I never can be God-like, so though I don’t give up, I never work really for what I can do—namely MY BEST. And this way I get into the comparing state which is Death because as soon as I start to compare myself I loose my uniqueness. I can only do mine and what is in me and the more I know myself, the self will then come out in my work.”
What does Borofsky mean to convey when he says, “And this way I get into the comparing state which is Death”? Why is “the comparing state” like death to him? I suspect that he is dealing with the shame that accompanies invidious comparison. Borofsky’s “comparing state” is most likely an emotional state, a mood based on some form of shame—a highly personal bundling of shame affect with his own concept of self. Intuitively we can grasp the idea that he is aware of a stratification of possible selves, levels of self-value. By choosing God to represent the highest possible level of personal attainment he guarantees constant shame, for the Judaeo-Christian God is always defined in terms of qualities that are unattainable by the human.
A wide range of self-as-identity and self-as-the-subject-of-appraisal appears in these anecdotes. The great martial artist sees his own ability and proudly, easily, appraises it as greatness. The competent actor feels pride that his accomplishments measure up to his best hopes for himself. The successful artist describes a damaged self. The comment made by the world’s best conductor can be viewed either as authoritative or arrogant, whatever the border between these two descriptors of competence. All these men show a tendency to rate themselves on some sort of scale, whether in terms of others, or in comparison to their own previous efforts, or along some yardstick unavailable to anyone else. The statements themselves, as well as our own responses to them, reflect the importance of shame and pride in matters of self-definition.
Earlier I mentioned that usually pride is affiliative and shame alienating. We love to hoist the victor on our shoulders. “Everybody loves a winner.” Alan Alda’s quiet pride drew me into the theater to see his films. Yet I recall quite well that many people followed the career of Mohammed Ali with prejudice based on a general attitude of dissmell and disgust attributed (at least in part) to his African heritage. Publicly they hoped someone might “give him his comeuppance” and “wipe that arrogant smile off that nigger’s face.” The great boxer’s pride produced a legion of angry, racist, shaming detractors, as well as the more expected troupe of admiring, complimentary fans.
Léon Wurmser once defined creativity as “the heroic transcendence of shame” (1981, 291). To the extent that one is the very best at something, or that one strives to be the best, one risks alienation from the remainder of humanity. In some cultures, Wurmser pointed out, anyone who dares to rise above the horde is shamed into emotional exile. Self-definition can be a risky business.
The struggle to define oneself when one is better than others at some task or skill, or when one possesses an attribute valued highly by others, is made more difficult by the reactions of those others. Those who are defeated will usually experience shame and feel estranged from the victor. Most often we hear about the “thrill of victory,” the pride or sense of triumph accompanying the success of a competitive venture. Rarely do we consider that one who “wins” may be guilty or embarrassed that s/he has caused the discomfort of another. Victory can “elevate” one right out of a peer group and produce shame!
“Who is that lovely girl?” asked a schoolteacher recently. “And why doesn’t she seem to have any friends? Nobody ever talks to her.” “Oh, that’s Mary-Louise,” said one of her classmates. “She was voted Most Popular Girl in the Class last year.” Often such recognition creates distance by triggering a sense of inadequacy in one’s peers and a compensatory alienating jealousy. Shame can accompany both victory and defeat in the struggle to define a “better” or a more effective self.
One generation of baseball fans was so attached to the work record of Babe Ruth that any athlete whose accomplishments rivaled those of their hero became the target of significant abuse. During the period that Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris eclipsed Ruth’s record for the number of home runs hit in a single season, these fans protested with vehemence that no athlete should dare to compare himself with Ruth. And as Henry Aaron’s lifetime home run record approached that of Babe Ruth, many whites said that “no Negro had the right even to think he was as good as Ruth.” It was bad enough that these fans were forced to accept the impermanence of dominance. It was even more difficult for them to accept a new hero whose other attributes made him the object of dissmell.
We seem to need heroes. They form some sort of ideal toward which we can strive. Whenever we approach our ideal we feel pride; whatever pushes us further from this standard causes shame. So important is this mechanism of model-making that people get quite upset when their hero is defeated or threatened with replacement. Of equal importance, and far more rarely discussed, is the fact that we seem to need goats. Most people function better when they know there is someone inferior to them. The internal psychological structures that surround and support the system of idealization, the very essence of what is ideal the entire system of best and worst, all of these are cognitive constructions built to house and perhaps disguise our lifetime of personal involvement with shame and pride. The very idea of personal identity seems to be intimately involved with whatever we measure along the shame/ pride axis.
Less clear is a rationale for the powerful linkage between these emotions and the nature of the self. We take it for granted that in adult life the complex ideoaffective families we call shame and pride are inextricably intertwined with the concept of self. But we have come a long way in our study of the process by which emotions are constructed over time, of how the building blocks of innate affects are assembled with our recorded and retrieved memories of situations in which those affects were triggered. We have come too far merely to accept that shame and pride are the emotions of self-appraisal without asking how they achieved this particular power. I believe that we have enough data to sketch the maps and circuit boards for this supremely important group of connections.
Yet just as we begin to focus our attention on the relation of the concept we call “self” to both shame and pride, we are forced to notice another range of problems. There are times that both emotions seem to involve people at what they experience as “the core of the self” and other times when shame or pride seem to be attached to a relatively minor attribute. In other words, shame varies from a global experience to a less wrenching specific happening. In every one of these experiences of shame it is “I” who am embarrassed, yet in each I experience myself quite differently. And we can be proud of a specific, limited ability or attribute, just as we can be proud of our entire being.
Recently, for example, a woman humiliated by a former lover told me, “I feel as if I can never show my face in public again. No one will ever ask me out. I am destroyed. I feel like dying. Maybe I really have died and this is hell.” Speaking to one of her students, the protagonist of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie describes the slur that destroyed her reputation as an “assassination.” Both women link the experience of shame with a profound reduction in the value of the total self. Still another woman remarks about the time a friend pointed out a defect in the design of her dress: “I was so embarrassed! I gave that dress to my sister.” Here it was not the self that was reduced in value, but the dress. How is it that in one case shame reduces the value of the entire organism, while in another it diminishes the importance of something that can be discarded?
The same holds true for pride. Does an accomplishment speak for a better self, or about improvement in some minor aspect of the whole? If a small boy hits a home run in sandlot baseball is he merely more competent at a task or already as good as Henry Aaron? What if I beat you at quoits, table tennis, badminton, handball, squash, bowling, boxing, wrestling, karate, or chess; if my team defeats yours in football, baseball, soccer, field hockey, volleyball, swimming, or lacrosse; if my school ranks higher than yours in the number of graduates placed prestigiously; if my nation explores the moon before yours? Each competition creates order ranked on the basis of some attribute. Neither contestant is changed in totality, neither declared to have a better soul or essence. There is a world of difference between an attribute and a self.
What links together all these different types of experience is, of course, the presence of the ideoaffective complexes we learn to call shame or pride. What makes the wounds of shame and the surge of pride vary along the axis of superficial to deep? How do the basic physiological mechanisms responsible for shame and pride get involved with the notion of “self,” and what explains the enormous variation in the depth of self associated with each experience of these powerful affective assemblies?
DEFINING THE SELF IN PSYCHOANALYTIC LANGUAGE
Just as you might expect, in the search for clarity it is the everyday words that give us the most trouble. In order to discuss the relation between the self and either shame or pride we need to agree about what we mean by the very idea of “self.” Most readers will be aware that during the past couple of decades my field has witnessed a shift from what Freud and his followers called ego mechanisms (the specific mental techniques and skills that differentiate a baby from an adult) to a focus on the nature of the whole person. There are now two major theoretical systems, each of which views the individual somewhat differently. Both are extremely important, both are used by the overwhelming majority of therapists, and both are dead wrong.
It is difficult for the uninitiated reader to understand that all psychoanalytic theory about the nature of infancy must be wrong simply because Freud deduced it by working backwards from the analysis of adults in treatment for emotional illness. It is based on what adults told him about their infancy or what he was able to reconstruct about their early lives from what they could not tell him. He never studied infants!
Freud believed that the infant lived in a completely narcissistic state, unable to distinguish the presence of other people as persons outside itself. In his system, the infant was declared incapable of understanding the concept of “otherness” and seen as experiencing every portion of its perceptual surround as a part of itself. In other words, all interaction with mother was defined as interaction within parts of this extended self. Freud maintained that there was no real infant-mother interface. Rather, the infant took for granted that mother was a part of an as-yet-undifferentiated mixture; in the mind of the child, infant and mother were, for all intents and purposes, fused. Emergence from the birth canal, freedom from the confines of the womb, the process of parturition itself did not really separate fetus and mother. Physical birth, thought Freud, was not psychological separation.
Relying again on the sexual life force he saw as the prime mover and the major agent of change in psychological development, Freud claimed for libido the primary responsibility for the differentiation of mother as a separate person. Not until the child became truly sexual (in the commonly accepted adult sense of the word) could the concept of mother emerge from this fusion. And, as the child became capable of seeing mother as a separate person, other people took on their realistic form as supplementary separate beings.
Let me state as succinctly as possible Freud’s equation for this complex philosophical position: As long as the libido force is thought to be concentrated in the organ of sustenance, the mouth, the child lives in an oral phase of psychosexual development. Mother, then, is merely a synonym for breast, for she is that which satisfies oral need. But Freud meant by this not the actual mammary gland of a specific person—the breast of mother—but the breast as a symbol of the food-giving, need-satisfying part of the fused or undifferentiated infant-mother continuum. At this stage, libido may be said to link child and mother.
A bit later in this hypothesized psychosexual development of the infant, the libido force is said to move from the oral realm to the anal. It is during this period of time that the child is forced to interact with an outside world that requires the establishment of internal controls previously unimaginable to the infant. Still, within Freudian theory, the mother is not viewed as a separate person, but as a part of the fused, undifferentiated system. Since mother is not viewed as a separate person but part of the inner world of the infant, her requests for the establishment of these inner controls are viewed as causing inner conflict within the psyche of the infant.
It is only when the libido force is declared to have made its final shift from the anal apparatus to the purely genital, and libido can finally be said to be a truly sexual force, that mother begins to be defined as a person separate from the child. To Freud, it was the child’s growing sexual interest in mother that created in the child a dawning realization of mother’s otherness. According to classical psychoanalytic theory, the action of lusting for another person defines that person as an other and defines the one who lusts as an individual a self. Mother and father, notwithstanding all the ways they have interacted with the child until this moment, are not believed to have had any influence on the internal development of the child. Within classical psychoanalytic theory, social interaction cannot be said to exist until self and object are split apart by the forces of libido; the child is defined as living in a state of narcissism until this moment.
There are some holes in this theory, as Freud and other members of his circle were quick to point out and later plug. It requires one to postulate that girls, who have no inherent biological reason to be sexually attracted to mother, achieve full freedom from the state of fusion and its associated narcissism only by recognition that they are different from boys, appreciation that they are boys who lack a full genital apparatus. It is only (says theory) when the girl realizes that her ‘little phallus,” the clitoris, is not a “real penis,” that she becomes, on the one hand, envious of the larger male organ and, on the other, capable of libidinous interest in men.
The dawning of sexual interest in father further highlights his otherness and helps define the female self. In our culture, women seem more interested in forming close relationships than men, who seem to favor independence and solitary activity. Many psychoanalysts believe that this pattern of adult behavior derives from the period in time when these supposed gender-linked differences in psychosexual development sent children on vastly different paths. Within this construction, women are seen as inherently more narcissistic than men because they have not detached themselves completely from the early fusion with mother.
So Freud produced a theory that links a postulated psychosexual development of the child (this assumed movement of libido from the oral to the anal to the phallic regions of the body) with the hypothesized shift from narcissism to true interpersonal relatedness. One major problem with this scheme is that it requires us to ignore completely the obvious fact that children from the earliest days of extrauterine life relate to their parents as if they were real people, each quite different from the other, and quite separate from themselves. And, of course, it avoids all the data provided by the affect system and its importance in producing an interpersonal world.
Most of the new developmental theorists, especially those who focus their attention on the affective life of the infant and the interplay between infant and caregiver of affect-related behavior, have long ago discarded libido theory and its restrictively sexual notion about the development of self and other. Although, as we will discuss in a later chapter, the infant derives a great deal of information from its sexual urges, the concepts of self and other are not dependent on genital strivings.
One psychoanalytic writer, Heinz Kohut (1971, 1977), noticed that some adults, while in psychoanalytic treatment, formed powerful transference relationships that could be neither explained nor treated on the basis of this scheme. For these patients, the analyst had come to represent a parent whose function seemed quite different from anything possible within classical theory. Kohut recognized that there were times that the infant needed to be soothed by mother, indeed, could only be soothed by mother. Focusing attention on the interplay between child and mother, but unaware of the existence of the innate affects, Kohut noted that the caregiver tends to mirror back to the infant some reflection of the infant’s inner states. Kohut suggested that this soothing function, so essential to normal parenting, was experienced by the infant as deriving from an extension of the infant’s self rather than from another individual.
Psychoanalytic language has its own unique syntax—the person being studied is referred to as the subject, and the other person with whom he or she is involved is called the object. Since, in classical psychoanalytic language, mother’s “breast” function is the one by which Freud thought she was known to the infant, and since the breast is only a part of her, mother is not considered an object (a whole person) but a part-object (a partial person). Kohut suggested that the infant sees in mother neither the presence of another whole person like itself nor a breast-like partial person, but a mirror of its own inner being. Looking at mother, he reasoned, the infant sees only whatever is being reflected back to it. For this reason he coined the term for mother-as-a-special-form-of-other, a particular variant of object that he called the selfobject. According to this theory, the selfobject is that part of the self the infant sees when it looks at mother. Mother is not really other because she only mirrors the child’s self.
Basch put it best in a recent conversation: “Within self-psychology, the infant is unaware of mother as a separate individual, but only as an extension of his own function. He wants the ball, she moves it to him; she is out of the room, he is angry. She is, therefore, a part of him just like his hand. Think of it like Aladdin and the genie of the lamp. The infant rubs the lamp, mother comes and does his bidding, then she returns to the lamp. It is not as if she is an extension of me, for there is no me; there is only an experience.” Self-psychologists devote a great deal of attention to what are called selfobject functions. For the most part, these are what I have discussed throughout this book as the techniques by which the caregiver experiences the affect that is broadcast by the infant and comes to act as an external modulator of displayed infantile affect.
Kohut’s work is seen by some as a revolution in theory and by others as only an evolutionary step. Not unlike Harry Stack Sullivan, the founder of American psychiatry, whose interpersonal psychiatry claimed that the personality of the individual is molded in a social context, Kohut made some alterations in classical psychoanalytic structure and established (for psychoanalysis) the importance of the caregiver’s role in helping to form the identity of the infant. In doing so, he shifted attention away from the preeminence of libido, thus earning the enmity of his more orthodox colleagues. The earlier bitter and often acrimonious debates between the proponents of these two wings of psychoanalysis have mellowed somewhat—everybody is beginning to focus more on the concept of self.
Unfortunately, Kohut believed that the infant was unable to see mother as anything but a selfobject early in development. But just as the mother is more to the child than a breast function (the mechanism that served the libido-based oral need), she is more to the infant than a mirroring selfobject. Simple observation of mother-child interaction reveals that mother is not limited to behavior that mirrors the affective states of the infant—and I think the child sees her as much more than a mirror. One of her attributes is this selfobject function (some sort of extension of the infant’s self), but she has other aspects that have nothing at all to do with selfobject functioning and is also therefore a clear example of “other.” For this reason I think it is wrong to view mother only as “the selfobject.” Mother has selfobject functions, but is always an other. Again, Basch explained it to me quite succinctly: “Only when the self of the infant is threatened does mother enter the picture as a selfobject. Otherwise, she is an independent center of activity and therefore an object.”
Why did Kohut make this error? I think he was trying to maintain Freud’s understanding of the infant-mother relationship, in which people were thought to emerge slowly from some sort of primordial relational slush into distinctly differentiated groups of self and others. He was unaware of the discriminatory power inherent in the innate affects, separate and highly differentiated scripts that create a host of inner experiences and outer displays that allow infant and mother to understand quite a bit about each other. So Kohut retained much more of Freudian psychology than necessary.
Instead of completely rejecting the idea that infant and mother are fused in some sort of narcissistic relational haze and recognizing that the infant is a separate being from the moment of birth (and perhaps before!), Kohut adopted Freud’s concept of normal infantile narcissism and extended it to form a major portion of his new self-psychology. Assuming (with Freud) that the self-concept emerges from a background of basic, inherent narcissism, Kohut called self-development the process of narcissistic development. Similarly, he viewed all of the problems that can occur in the development of the sense of self as narcissistic disturbances. Kohut discussed cases in which patients suffered pain from “narcissistic injury” (1972). At times he seemed to understand this as shame, but he clearly misunderstood shame as merely another part of the more general negative state called “anxiety” by Freud.
One of the purposes of this current book is to offer psychology a way out of the terminological quagmire described above. We need a language for the self, but one based on the healthy and normal, on what can be observed in the infant and tested in the relationship between infant and caregiver. Our search for a new language of the self should be aided immeasurably by this review of the innate affects as a biological reality that evolves into a psychological system somewhat different for each person and by our new awareness of the importance of the affect system in the evolution of the sense of self.
Working a century ago, within a biological science truly primitive by our current standards, Freud was an archaeologist who attempted to deduce the nature of normal functioning from the analysis of desperately sick patients. The Freudian infant is a theoretical construction, little pieces of psychopathology glued together to make a strangely limited kind of baby. This “derived” infant can become an adult only after it has developed the ego mechanisms necessary to allow the solution of problems that exist solely within Freudian theory. The Kohutian baby develops a self only after negotiating the stages of “narcissistic development.”
These differences in definition are not trivial. Agreement with the Freudian scheme of psychosexual development requires acceptance of two parallel progressions—that of libido energy from mouth to anus to phallus, and that of interpersonal relatedness from narcissism to object-relatedness in the context of this libidinal development. In this system, nearly everything is viewed in a sexual context. Shame is viewed as the failure to renounce sexual exhibitionism—all shame is either vaguely or specifically sexual.
Acceptance of the Kohutian scheme of “narcissistic development” limits one’s understanding of shame to those situations in which there has been a “narcissistic injury” or in which the sense of self has been damaged. Andrew Morrison, the self psychologist best known for his writings about shame, commented to me that “shame is an affective response to a perception of the self as flawed, and thus inevitably involves narcissism.”
I realize that these few pages of description are neither detailed enough to do justice to the two schools of thought described nor concise enough to satisfy the reader who may wonder why I have devoted so much space to these two particular concepts of self. For the adult, however, shame is almost always defined as the pain associated with some perceived deficiency in the self, and pride as the pleasure associated with an elevation in the sense of self. Not surprisingly, within the psychoanalytic world, it is the self-psychologists who have at last begun to pay attention to shame, although they remain a bit skittish about the nature of pride. (After all, people come to doctors complaining about pain rather than pleasure.) And the pain caused by damage to the self is called shame.
Within either of these highly regarded views of shame it would be unthinkable to consider shame as an innate affect, a physiological mechanism that limits the expression of interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy. Both philosophies ignore the fact that newborn infants show all the facial and bodily manifestations of shame. In these theoretical systems shame means narcissism, shame means sexual exhibitionism. And now we affect theorists come along suggesting that shame can occur in an organism too young to have enough of a self-concept that it can be damaged in an interpersonal context, and well before the libido force has even reached the level of genital sexuality. How strange it must seem to one trained in these philosophies to read here that shame can exist before the cognitive equipment of the child can allow the mechanism of self-reflection and inner looking!
Some years ago, when I began to write about these matters, I yielded to the pressure of my prior training and used the term “proto-shame” to describe these early experiences of shame affect. This new term helped my colleagues accept the idea that the scripted firmware mechanism Tomkins calls shame–humiliation can affect us long before we have a self-concept, long before we can know enough about our self-system to see it as damaged. But it drew attention away from the far more important issue: Very, very few of the experiences in which any affect is triggered have labels. This whole book represents my attempt to shift our language away from an adult-oriented emotion vocabulary toward one based squarely on the concept and language of innate affect. There is no such thing as “proto-shame.” There is only a huge group of experiences in which shame affect plays a role; of these only a tiny fraction is known as the shame family of emotions.
Our next task is to define the self in the new language made possible by affect theory and the recent decades of research in infant observation. We must show how the child’s growing self-concept becomes intimately linked with the affect of shame and the emotion of pride. As happens so often, the data have long been available and ready for assembly.