SHAME AND THE SELF
Daniel Stern, a psychoanalytically trained infant researcher, has suggested that we think of the hypothetical Freudian baby, derived as it is from the work of those therapists who treat disturbed adults, as “the clinical infant” and of the baby described here as “the observed infant.” The clinical infant fits the data reconstructed from classical psychoanalysis and is a useful construction within that discipline.
The Kohutian baby seems to be a little closer to the real thing, even though it too is a construction derived from the psychoanalytic investigation of disturbed adults. Kohut is right to point out that the self is more than a bunch of ego mechanisms, even though his inability to give up the idea of infantile narcissism places rigid limits on the usefulness of his work.
Yet we need to spend a moment or two redefining some of this language. What do we really mean when we use words like “self” or “person”? We talk about character structure, but what is a “character”? These terms are used so much in the world of psychology, and used so differently by so many people, that we are in danger of losing them unless we find some acceptable standard of definition. In the bookshelf flanking one wall of my consultation room sit those texts and novels I use for emphasis during therapy sessions. Nearest to my hand is a dictionary, the book I use more than any other. In my study at home rests a much larger dictionary, which protects me from the confusion that afflicts all writers. Like most of my colleagues, when these otherwise competent references fail me, I dive into the greatest work of scholarship ever assembled, the Oxford English Dictionary, where one can trace the history of a word. The OED is a series of articles about words, scholarly documents explaining—and demonstrating with examples—how a word accumulated the meanings by which we know it today.
Words travel through history accumulating meanings and rarely losing them completely. What the OED does best is draw me backwards in time. A session with the OED is an archaeological expedition showing how a word represented experiences, feelings, and emotions in the cultures that preceded ours. Affect-laden words travel through time collecting culture-bound connotation. That seems very much to me like the definition of emotion itself used throughout this book. I am trying to show how the concepts of shame and pride are derived for each of us over the course of our lives.
How we as a culture know these words today is dependent on the world in which we have grown up as that civilizing tradition has evolved through time. Forgive the analogy that springs naturally to the mind of one trained first in biology—recall the statement that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It is a reminder that each human embryo, in its path from zygote to full-term fetus, resembles in its appearance the ancestral life forms from which our species evolved. I believe that our contemporary words for emotion carry with them all the implications that can possibly be derived from their usage through history.
So old is the word self that its origins are obscure. It appears in most European languages, from Gothic to Scandinavian, with remarkably little difference in spelling or pronunciation. The root se appears in the Latin ipse, which conveys the sense of sameness. (In medicine we refer to something on the same side of the body as ipsilateral as opposed to something on the other side, which is therefore contralateral.) The German form of this root is selbst; in Old English it is written selfa or selva.
From the earliest written uses of the word self we see this concept of sameness. A self-bow is a bow made out of one piece of wood, a self-handle is one carved into the body of an object. When we refer to somebody as himself, or to our own person as myself, we acknowledge that an individual has certain attributes or qualities that are invariant. John, or Bill, or Mary can each be said to be or have a self, to be themselves because we recognize in them something that makes them unique. Intrinsic to the idea of self is some sort of consistency despite what might also be changed.
This differs somewhat from the word identity, which also conveys the idea of sameness—identity is a label that remains attached to a person or thing as long as it is not altered. It conveys the sense of things being the same in substance, nature, composition, or properties. Identity is about absolute or essential sameness, the sense of “oneness.” Anyone whose appearance is changed radically by plastic surgery, and who is thus viewed differently by others, is said to have undergone a change in identity. I have assumed a new identity if my “label” has changed so much that you cannot recognize me—even though my “self” has not been remodeled. In current usage, identity refers to those more external or superficial features by which we are known, whereas self refers to all aspects—inner and outer.
The concept of self, then, is an overarching construct. It takes into account that we have good moods and bad moods, that we have successes and failures, that we look good on some days and simply awful on others. The self is an umbrella concept—everything about us fits into it—a system rather than an entity.
We toy with this idea of sameness when we say “I’m not myself today,” indicating that we would like to disavow some particular portion of our makeup. Declaring a component piece of us to be not-self is probably a way to escape the implications of some part of our makeup that brings us negative affect.
Such an understanding of self is helpful when we try to understand the concept of other, which the OED defines as “that one of two which remains when one is taken, defined, or specified.” In the world of people and their relationships, “other” can only be defined while we are in the process of defining “self.” Those who have the greatest difficulty understanding the nature of others are usually those who have the most trouble establishing a sense of self or whose idea of self is the most distorted. Sometimes we therapists discuss this in terms of boundaries—it is necessary for each of us to determine the limits of our self in order for us to know who we are in relation to others.
The sense of self becomes more complex over time, partly because the cognitive equipment available to the infant is far less developed than that available to the adult. It is assembled from the informational matrix formed by experiences accumulated as we develop a personal history. If “other” is what remains when we subtract “self,” then we know intuitively that the concept of other must also develop over time, along pathways analogous to those determined by the development of the concept of self.
The word character also has an interesting history. It starts out as the instrument used to make a mark that cannot be erased—an engraving tool. Later, the word comes to mean the mark itself, as in a “character of the alphabet.” Whatever has been “characterized” has been marked indelibly. The forehead of bondslaves might be marked with the character of a horse, defining people as the property of their owner, just as modern ranchers still brand their livestock. Individual adults can be characterized by their invariant qualities, which become the hallmarks by which we identify them.
When we say that someone has such-and-such a character, we imply that a simple term can encompass or symbolize all the features of a highly complex individual. Thus, a playwright can give an actor enough information to portray (make a portrait of) the person created for dramatic purpose. When we give a “character reference” for someone we have stated our belief that the interpersonal style of an adult can be sketched fairly simply. It is the fact that so much of an individual falls into a clear pattern, a gestalt, that allows us to treat this gestalt itself as an entity to which we can make reference. “Character” has evolved from the tool that makes a mark, to the pattern of the mark itself, to its present use as a pattern existing only in the mind of the observer.
The idea behind person is quite different. Its earliest appearance is in the Latin word persona, the mask held by performers in a drama to cover the face and thus give them a different apparent identity. This sense of the word remains in theatrical programs, where the list of characters is still called Dramatis Personae. You can see the linkage between the idea of a character played by an actor and the mask by which an actor once signified the nature of the role so assumed. The concept of person, or personality, seems to take into account that we play roles in life. It has to do with roles taken on, offices assumed, characters played out.
Often we hear that nothing in the history of a politician prepares us for what he or she will be like as an elected leader. No matter what someone has been like as a lawyer, judge, or senator, appointment to the Supreme Court brings out qualities previously unpredictable. The personality adapts—it is merely one facet of the larger entity, the self. Given a new role, we tend to change our person both for ourselves and for other people. Professional actors often say that their lives, their careers, their day-to-day character structure are permanently altered by the roles they have played on the stage or screen. Phrases and expressions like “clothes make the man,” or “let the marines make a man of you,” or “dress for success,” or “dressed to kill,” convey the idea that roles are costumed much as the mask worn by the Roman actor became his persona.
Each role assumed, each personality essayed, involves (among other things) some specific pattern of affect display. In each role we vary somewhat the range over which we modulate innate affects.
Look what happens if I take on the role of a sophisticated, urbane, upper-class WASP gentleman: Shelved, for the moment, will be my own more characteristic ebullience and the tendency to wave my arms as (with interest–excitement) I warm to my subject. My body will be held in a relaxed and easy-going posture; everything about me will suggest that I am in command. My facial set will be one you might describe as “sensitive”; when upset I will tend to turn away in a mild demonstration of reticence (shame–humiliation). Brought to the fore will be such mannerisms as an air of utter restraint, a debonair and condescending attitude of uninvolvement (mild disgust and dissmell) in the antics of what are now defined as “lesser folk,” and a certain highly stylized set of attitudes toward nearly everything, all expressed with considerable economy of gesture. When mildly angry, I will tend to become scornful and raise one corner of my lip in contempt; when very angry I will tend to imbibe alcohol in order to allow myself full expression of temper as massive rejection based on disgust and calculated to produce in the recipient terrible shame. Maturity, for me, will be displayed in terms of relaxed self-confidence.
Quite in contrast will be the schedule of affect regulation posted for certain working-class men of Mediterranean extraction. To play this role I must hold differently my entire body. I am required to accentuate my muscularity, adopt a somewhat truculent attitude, and convey to the outside world that I am ready, willing, and perhaps eager to deal with you as a source of physical danger. I will express interest with large, powerful, and definite movements of my entire upper body—on occasion I will smile broadly to indicate my approval, clench my fist like a boxer and punch upward from the shoulder in emphasis. I will tend to walk on the balls of my feet with a springiness that indicates that I am prepared to greet a new situation with rapid physical activity. When upset I will jut forward my lower jaw or square my shoulders as if in preparation for a fight. On occasion, I may raise my eyebrows in mock surprise at something you have said, tilt my head to the side in the characteristic gesture of a boxer preparing to dip one shoulder in readiness for a blow, and ask you to repeat yourself. Like my upper-class friend, I will use alcohol as a general disinhibiting agent, but the affects released will be more boisterous. Brought up in a macho culture, I will fight rather than exhibit distress or shame. Maturity will be expressed in terms of readiness to fight.
These cultural differences are probably not bred in the genes. I know plenty of Mediterranean gentlemen of extraordinary refinement and lots of truculent WASPs. The overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that such behavior is trained into us during childhood by a culture or subculture with highly specific rules for the display and control of innate affect. (Even in common language we say that someone “affects” a personality.) Each role or cultural stereotype involves a different pattern of affects damped or magnified—what Tomkins calls “the differential magnification of innate affect.” And when I, as an actor, mimic these stereotypes for you, I have succeeded in “creating” the character by altering the set of rules for the modulation of innate affect I consider normal and adopting the rule book used by those from another society. But when I, as the actor, “take off my makeup” and say, “Hey guys! It’s only me,” I have declared the existence of an umbrella under which all of these parts have been performed, a “real” self that is my personal concept of “me.”
Few of us have the skill and training to be professional actors. Yet all of us play a variety of roles in everyday life. So much is this true that we tend to mock people who are limited in the range of roles they can assume, saying that they do not know “how to behave” in certain situations. I am not (my “self” is not) a character but rather a range of characters, not a role but an assemblage of roles; my personality varies to fit the immediate situation.
I should point out here that there is a rarely achieved level of maturity, a final form of self-evolution, in which an individual has learned what is called “mastery of self.” Zen masters and others who have achieved significant degrees of enlightenment demonstrate a remarkable order of attainment in a wide variety of situations—but their personality seems invariant. (A good mid-nineteenth-century American example of this is the character of Eugene in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Great Stone Face.”) Mastery of anything is unusual enough—given the high visibility in this era of professional sports presented as entertainment, we are more likely to see it in great athletes near the end of their career than anywhere else—and mastery of self an exquisitely rare extension of that realm of development.
In my personal experience, most people who seem to “have it all together” are pretty much fake—enlightenment is for them merely a role to be assumed rather than a state of being. Perhaps you recall the character of Yoda in the Star Wars series of movies—a costly plastic marionette with the facial and bodily display of enlightenment, designed to mimic the lively sameness associated with the rarely achieved real thing. Almost all of us look different when we are required to act differently. We are deferential to our priests, haughty to our servants; we tug our forelocks in the face of authority and act somewhat more discourteously free-spirited as spectators at the stadium. We “gear up” to be daring, seductive, brave, cowardly, truculent, or gracious when occasion demands or permits.
In general, then, merely trying to be different fosters the emergence of a somewhat new personality. It does not matter whether we have learned new behaviors through happenstance or from a script as suggested by an author outside the self. What we have done in one role can be carried over into another. Yet all of the roles I have assumed, all of the characters I have played on the stage of life, all of the personalities I have exhibited in my interpersonal world, all of these are subsumed under the overarching construct of self.
This, incidentally, is why we therapists can assure our patients that no matter how they change in psychotherapy, they retain the right and the ability to go on being whoever they were before they entered. Therapy doesn’t commit one to any single role! Successful therapy, however, expands the sum total of roles available to the individual.
Adults are expected, required, to play a certain number of roles. I think it is pretty easy to accept such a role-based concept of the relation between personality and self when we look at grown-ups. Two critical questions leap to mind: Is this true of children (do they play roles)? And, if children develop by learning a series of roles, how do all the roles come to be coalesced into a unitary self?
Maybe the first question is a bit silly. Of course we know that children play roles. They imitate nearly everything and everybody at every stage of their development. To watch a child grow up is to attend the theater of roles assumed, assimilated, and discarded. Increasing maturity does not halt the process of experimentation—it merely allows us to substitute the audience of our peers for the original family of spectators.
By framing the problem in this manner I have called attention to the fact that our mature style of role assumption, of character formation, is only a late derivative (a final form) of the normal process through which children learn to become adults. One cannot understand childhood without comprehension of the enormous number and variety of roles played by growing people. Every bit of business attempted by a child is being tested to see if it is worthy of incorporation into the final form of the self. Roles are shaped and limited by shame, the affect of impediment to excitement and enjoyment.
The second question is a bit more difficult to answer. Early on, it is only when a role achieves importance in the context of the infant–mother relationship that it is rehearsed often enough to be made permanent. What we call “the self” is not an innate internal structure but a composition formed in an interpersonal context. The durability of any new behavior is dependent on the affect it elicits from the caregiver as well as from within. The shape of the self is heavily dependent on the affects generated in a complex interpersonal milieu. And, finally, the cohesiveness of the self system (the integrity of the package into which all these component personal styles are assembled) is completely dependent on the ability and willingness of the caregivers to accept them as part of a whole.
Another pair of questions: How early does the self begin to form? And, how early in self-development does shame begin to get bundled into identity? Since shame will be triggered any time there is an impediment to ongoing interest–excitement or enjoyment–joy, we can assume that shame will be experienced quite early. (Certainly we can demonstrate the visible expression of shame affect in the days-old infant.) It remains for us to determine how early we can link shame to those experiences through which the infant develops its personal identity.
Although there are many theorists, clinicians, and experimenters who have worked on this problem, I will concentrate on the writings of the two who have interested me most, Daniel Stern and Johanna Krout Tabin. Each of them published a book in 1985. Stern summarized his years of research observing babies in The Interpersonal World of the Infant and offered a new way of integrating an astonishing amount of scientific data. It is devoted to the problem we have just been discussing, the nature and the development of the self.
Tabin, a psychoanalytic psychologist with a deep and abiding interest in the eating disorders called anorexia nervosa and bulimia, forces our attention on something all of us thought had been settled by Freud at the other end of the century—the sexual life of the infant. Her book, On the Way to Self: Ego and Early Oedipal Development, asks us to recognize that the infant shows signs of sexual arousal from the earliest days of extrauterine life. Just as generations of psychologists said that the facial display of affect seen on the face of the newborn was unimportant because it was “only a reflex,” we have always ignored the infant boy’s equally visible erections. Most important for our purposes is her conviction that the toddler decides “I’m a girl!” or “I’m a boy!” at least partly on the basis of the way it feels to be sexually aroused. Thus, a significant portion of our identity (the label called gender identity) is conveyed by the sexual drive, a prewritten program as basic to our life form as the affects.
To my disappointment, neither book deals with affect theory and the work of Tomkins. Although Stern recognizes that innate affect is central to the experience of the growing infant, he avoids any attempt to define affect and ignores Tomkins almost completely; the words sex, gender, and shame do not even appear in his index. Tabin, a classically trained psychoanalyst, was innocent of the work described in this current book. And neither seems to have been aware of the work cited by the other.
Both of these sober and excellent scholar/scientist/clinicians seem to me to have areas of blindness. Stern ignores or finds no significance in what Tabin sees so clearly, that baby boys have highly conspicuous erections in situations that seem interpersonal. Also, although he is aware that affect causes things to happen all over the body, he is singularly uninterested in the face as well as in the search for whatever might trigger affect. Indeed, his misunderstanding of affect forms a deep flaw in an otherwise landmark book. Tabin apparently accepts Freud’s theory that the affects come from the drives—she, too, ignores the data available on the face of the infant. She derives most of the sense of self from genital arousal and accepts without question the concepts of infantile narcissism, infant-mother fusion, and the idea that development requires separation from this fused, narcissistic state.
Clearly, if these investigators devoted entire books to their work on the development of the self, I can do justice to neither in these few pages. I will allude to their ideas and recommend both books to my fellow students and clinicians. In the passages and chapters that follow I will describe a theory for the formation of the sense of self and other that takes into account Stern’s summary of the data on infant-mother interaction, Tabin’s understanding of sexual arousal, Tomkin’s work on innate affect, and my own interest in shame. I ask the indulgence of my colleagues for the omission of the host of references from which these ideas have been drawn.
THE WAYS OF SENSING SELF
During the first two months after birth, as Stern points out, the infant is occupied with the task of adjustment to extrauterine life. Doubtless it could not live unless protected by certain prewritten programs that organize its behavior to some extent. Drawing on the language of computers for my analogies, I referred earlier to the drives and affects as firmware, analogous to data processing programs that can be written as integrated circuits, installed on “chips,” and inserted in computers. Firmware is neither software nor hardware. Although part of our genetic heritage, and therefore not software like the training programs and other learning experiences from which we build a self, neither is it hardware like our bones, muscles, blood vessels, and neurological equipment.
The affects are a group of built-in mechanisms triggered in response to conditions of stimulation that recur constantly throughout life. Every time an affect is triggered, the infant is exposed to a sequence of events that is relatively invariant. Similarly, the drives are responses to needs that recur constantly, responses that inform the organism both that something is needed and the region of the body where that need can be satisfied.
Consider, for a moment, hunger and the transactions associated with eating. The newborn baby is not capable of “deciding” that it is hungry. When the level of glucose in its blood drops within a critical range, the hunger drive triggers a message that begins a sequence of events culminating in feeding behavior. The information provided by the drive system has no inherent urgency, so the way the infant will experience (“receive” or “process”) this message depends entirely on the affects that amplify it.
Some of this activity is highly variable. Mother may be right there, smiling at a baby who has just begun to exhibit sucking movements—and she may be quite prepared to offer breast or bottle. Alternatively, mother may be in the next room, taking a much-needed break from her rapt attention to the baby, whose earliest indications of need will go unnoticed. The persistent call of hunger now acts as a competent stimulus for the affect distress–anguish, producing first a couple of sobs and eventually a full spectrum of crying behaviors that blend into anger-rage as the density of stimulation reaches the range set for its release. What the caregiver finds is a hungry infant in a crying rage. What the caregiver must do is modulate (soothe) the baby’s affect display, make sure what need (drive) has triggered this highly visible assemblage of affects, and provide what is required. The variable aspects of the situation depend on a great many factors, including the length of time the infant has been hungry and the ability of the caregiver to respond to this need.
Nevertheless, certain parts of this system are invariant: Hunger occurs with regularity; hunger amplified by affect makes the caregiver appear; the appearance of the caregiver means that food will appear; food makes hunger wane; the combination of food and caregiver also modulates negative affect and triggers positive affect. Since our concept of the self focuses on the idea of invariant qualities, any time we find an invariant experience it must be evaluated for its relevance to the self.
Stern says it nicely: “Sense of self is not a cognitive construct. It is an experiential integration” (1985, 71). Initially, the self is not something that is created by conscious thought, but rather the summation of our invariant experiences. The drives, the affects, and the actions of the caregivers in handling the constantly recurring situations triggered by these built-in mechanisms, the very patterns formed by these sequences, are enough of an invariant that they may be said to provide some framework for the experience of self. During the first two months of life, when the job of the caregivers is to act as regulators for the infant, Stern suggests that the baby demonstrates an “emerging sense of self.” With the slow, steady emergence of the sense of self comes a matching emerging sense of the caregiving other.
Tomkins has commented that it looks as if there is something genetically given in the infant that makes it elect to imitate its own actions, to improve on what had been initially a reflex. The urge to improve on nature seems to be built into our very equipment! The hungry newborn will make sucking motions, and it is clear that these muscular activities are prewired reflexes—set in motion by a prewritten script. Yet within a few hours of birth the infant can be observed imitating its own previously reflexive sucking movements—taking over, as it were, cultivating happenstance into intentionality. From the moment of birth the infant automatically tracks mother with its eyes; yet within hours the child is capable of substituting voluntary tracking for what had only a moment ago been a reflexive action.
Even though it is initially innate affect that takes over the face of the baby and makes it frown or smile, the child soon learns to “make faces” on purpose. Even though it is the drive hunger that makes the infant produce sucking movements, and the need for oxygen that makes it breathe, the child soon learns to suck when it wants and to alter its breathing “on purpose.” The newborn’s efforts at the intentional simulation of bodily functions initially produced by the action of prewritten scripts (its autosimulation of affect- and drive-related behavior) are the result of observations that must be analyzed to whatever extent is necessary to allow conscious imitation. Whatever behavior the growing child attempts, whatever skills it tries to master, each series of self-directed actions becomes part of the child’s definition of self for that epoch of development.
The programmed response, whether a sucking reflex, or a tracking reflex, or an affective reaction, is not necessarily an I. But as soon as the infant decides that I will do it, the self-concept has begun to form. With the decision to initiate behavior comes the beginning of self-affirmation. Whatever is done voluntarily defines a self.
As soon as the infant learns to recognize that crying brings mother, that infant is capable of using the vocal and facial display of cries and whimpers as a semiotic device to achieve contact with mother. Thus, the visible portion of an innate affect comes to be used intentionally even when the conditions for the triggering of that behavior as a true innate affect have not been met. The sequence of events involved—intentional whimper; mommy runs over to me; mommy picks me up; I am pleased that my trick got mommy to pick me up—this entire sequence of events allows one of the earliest types of self-definition. Nobody but I did that. I intended to whimper, I intended that mommy would react to my whimper. I am a center of intention; conversely, wherever there is intention there is an I.
Developmental theorists argue this point a great deal. How, some ask, can we say that an infant has a sense of self when it is not yet capable of conscious and intentional internal reflection, when it is unable to meditate on the nature of the self? Intrinsic to the sense of self, they say, is the ability to think intentionally about the self. The ability to reflect, to understand that others can see us when we do not intend them to see us, that we are the object of the attention of others—these aspects of self-awareness are milestones in development achieved somewhere in the second year of life. And these theorists find it hard to accept the idea that there is any sort of self-concept before there is an inward-reflecting self. They confuse the idea of self with the ability to focus attention on the self.
The answer, of course, is inherent in the definition of self that we established earlier. Any action that can be planned, initiated, carried out from beginning to end and remembered as a personally written script will be subsumed under the umbrella of “me.” The knowledge that I did something is equivalent to the knowledge that there is an I who does things. The concept of self travels through development along with every other part of us. The earliest form of self-definition is made of the information associated with the decision to imitate one’s own unintentional actions. The more advanced versions constitute an upgrade on the earlier product—they contain the sort of information that accumulates over time and is made possible only by the incremental advances in brain function accompanying biological development. The intricacy of our psychology varies directly with the complexity of the equipment available to it.
Stern proposes that the sense of self develops in fairly discrete jumps. Birth brings emergence from the warm, dark, quiet world of the womb where food is supplied automatically through the umbilical cord—issue into the cold, harshly bright, noisy outside universe. Even hunger must be a novel and somewhat unpleasant experience for the newborn. He suggests that the sense of self begins to emerge during the first two months, during the period when child and caregivers are negotiating the regulation of all these physiological needs that had previously been handled by the intrauterine environment.
During the third through sixth months, infants develop what he calls a “core self,” becoming increasingly certain that “they and mother are quite separate physically, are different agents, have different affective experiences, and have separate histories” (27). Over the next couple of months, they discover that the people outside have minds like their own, and that they can relate to others on the basis of shared feelings and experiences. Stern calls this the “sense of a subjective self” (27). At around the age of 15 months, as the infant is developing an ever-increasing vocabulary, it begins to develop a “verbal self” (28). Words confer the ability to render objects by symbols and to negotiate with the caregivers on the basis of these shared symbols. Not long after, noted Stern, the three-year-old demonstrates the emergence of a “narrative self,”* a me who can tell stories about me, and who can therefore create a desired sense of me for you. With the development of Stern’s narrative self comes what I interpret as a marked increase in our conscious control over the nature of the self.
Using Stern’s schedule for the development of the self, let us see how the infant might experience shame affect during the first three years of life: The conditions for shame affect are simply that the infant must already be experiencing either of the positive affects (interest–excitement or enjoyment–joy), that whatever conditions had triggered positive affect remain operative, and that some impediment to the continuation of positive affect be encountered. Shame, then, is a painful amplification of any impediment to positive affect. It is an auxiliary mechanism, a piece of firmware that limits the operation of other affects. Shame produces a sudden loss of muscle tone in the neck and upper body; increases skin temperature on the face, frequently resulting in a blush; and causes a brief period of incoordination and apparent disorganization. No matter what behavior is in progress when shame affect is triggered, it will be made momentarily impossible. Shame interrupts, halts, takes over, inconveniences, trips up, makes incompetent anything that had previously been interesting or enjoyable.
Have I conveyed enough of the sense of shame affect for you to see it as I do? Shame impedes what until that moment had been most interesting or most enjoyable. When triggered, it interferes with precisely those activities that cause the most pleasure to the infant. Every instance of shame is a moment of painful incapacity. The younger the child, the more dependent the sense of self on the presence of prewired invariant capabilities and the ability to simulate these as learned behavior. And the younger the child who experiences shame affect, the more powerful will be the interference with the sense of self. Shame is the great undoing of whatever had been exciting or pleasurable.
But how early can we see evidence of shame affect? Watching the development of his own son, Tomkins mentioned to me his observation that at three weeks Mark was clearly trying to imitate human speech by mimicking the mouth movements of adults. But the neurological equipment of an infant is unable to handle such sophisticated skills. This is one of those situations where desire outruns ability, where life places natural impediments in the path of a wish. Only failure could reward each of his attempts to make speech, and each failed attempt was followed by the slump of shame. Demos, studying infants with film and videotape, has recorded many similar examples of neonatal shame. It seems that most observers have ignored the data I would find most significant—that shame affect can be seen in babies long before they can be said to experience embarrassment.
One might think that such an affect would have little to do with the development of a sense of self, that it would even tend to undo whatever experiential integration had already been achieved. Yet to the extent that shame itself is a scripted mechanism, a programmed unfolding of bodily reactions, shame is a relatively invariant experience. I suspect that shame produces a sense of an incompetent self, that there is a part of the self created by shame.
Furthermore, I believe that very little in the life experience of the child calls attention to the nature of the self as powerfully as does shame affect. First there is a me who was just beginning to look at, or perhaps do, something interesting. I am used to that self; I know me in that mode of activity; I have certain expectations of that self. But now along comes some impediment, some totally unexpected interference with my interest or enjoyment in looking or doing or communing. Suddenly, even though the activity itself continues to look interesting or pleasing, I am in the throes of shame affect. My neck is no longer under my own control; my eyes cannot look at the object of my desires; my thinking process and all my heretofore confident actions are suddenly scrambled.
So there is a me before the moment of shame and a me who is in the midst of a shame experience. Shame wanes as I withdraw interest or stop trying to commune with whatever had previously been enjoyable. (There is life after shame.) I recover, I come back to my former self, although perhaps with some lesser degree of aplomb. (Aplomb is more about shame and pride than you might think. Plumbum is the Latin word for lead and refers to the weight on a string used by surveyors to define a perpendicular line. Aplomb means the ability to stand proud and straight, rather than droop in shame.) Shame is so uncomfortable that it can cause a lingering sense of wariness, of unwillingness to trust positive affect quite so easily. A burned child dreads the fire that brought pain, and a shamed child avoids (at least briefly) the full expression of positive affect.
All of the modern students of child behavior, the experts in infant observation, seem to agree that infants are born to make comparisons. They seem always able to weigh one perception against another, whether the information comes from vision, hearing, touch, the sense of body motion (proprioception), temperature, or from the complex sources we call innate affect. I suspect that even the very young child can tell the difference between the self that is competent and the self that is made uncoordinated by shame.
I suggest that the innate affect shame–humiliation, at all ages and in all stages of human development, is a powerful mechanism for the elaboration of the sense of self. The very ability of shame affect to upset all mental activity, to render incompetent our ability to perform intentional activity, to afflict muscle tone in the head and neck, to wrestle gaze away from what might have occupied us only a moment ago—all these powers of shame force us to consider who we were before shame hit and to what we have returned as shame subsides. Shame is the affect most likely to produce attention to the nature of the self. Shame produces a painful self-awareness at every stage in human development simply because of the ability of this affect script to interfere with every pleasant way we know ourselves. Through shame we are forced to know and remember our failures. While it is clear that shame affect is triggered by experiences that have nothing at all to do with competence, shame produces awareness of an incompetent self.
That may not be such a bad deal, after all. If you were going to design a system capable of learning from experience and educating itself, you might as well build in the capacity to magnify failure. Shame augments our memory of failure and protects us from whatever danger might occur, when, in a moment of need, we might try something well beyond our capacity. An intelligent organism will avoid what might produce pain unless there are compelling reasons to accept that noxious reward. Near the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64 the speaker comments, “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate.” So shame is a teacher, often drawing us within ourselves to think deeply about the self.
We should not ignore, even for a moment, the fact that the process of trying out a new character, of learning new functions, of diving into the depths of our soul to find a new way to live or to be, that none of these activities can be accomplished without the amplification of affect. Nothing new is attempted unless affect makes it urgently important. Whenever these new activities are greeted by success, we are likely to experience pride. And whatever acts as an impediment to the completion of an action that involves interest–excitement or the contentment of enjoyment–joy will be afflicted painfully by the amplified analogue of that impediment, shame–humiliation. Therefore it is easy to understand why the coassembly of shame affect with memory is to such a remarkable degree a self-related experience.
We have left unanswered one realm of questions set earlier: Why does shame afflict us sometimes to the core of the self and at other times appear as the merest of inconveniences? Why do some people describe shame as “the death of the soul” when others see only a mild insult to be shrugged off? In a Talmudic tractate we are told that to humiliate one in public is worse than shedding blood; anyone who mocked the oversized nose of Cyrano de Bergerac risked death at the hands of the great swordsman. (Real blood exchanged for humiliation—retaliation is indeed talionic!) How can the same affect mechanism account for situations in which we are “embarrassed to death” (mortified) and also those in which we are embarrassed about something quite limited, some aspect of the self clearly demarcated from the whole by firm walls and boundaries? Why do shame and pride afflict the self in levels, sizes, grades, intensities, magnitudes, dimensions?
There is a whole range of solutions for this puzzle. We know intuitively that it has something to do with age. With maturity comes the ability to modulate all affects; shame, too, can be tamed and held within limits. The younger a child, the more thoroughly and deeply will shame produce disorganization. The infant whose every muscle slumps suddenly when it has been defeated in the act of will is a muddled mess of a baby until the moment of shame passes and other affects lend their more positive urgency. This is shame affect unmodulated, shame pure but by no means simple.
There is a point in development when we learn to recognize that someone is trying to humiliate us. This awareness allows us to bring into play other learned mechanisms, and we become capable of deciding not to let our reactions show. Conscious control of affect display will always mute emotional experience, just as the intentional augmentation of affect display will amplify it. Even the “cognitive shock” of shame can be limited by certain learned strategies. Later in this book I will discuss how I think this is accomplished, but for the moment I want only to point out that it can be done at all.
The maturation of affect modulation has been little studied. There is a flow, a rhythm to these capacities, which Tomkins describes as “the differential magnification of innate affect.” Parents take it for granted that little children must be taught to “keep a stiff upper lip,” not to gloat when they win, and to control irrepressible laughter without losing the sense of fun. (I remember how my daughter and her friends used to giggle when I would ask them, “Please scream softly.”) Psychiatrists take for granted the matching tasks of first teaching patients the freedom to express anger within the safety of the therapeutic encounter and then helping them learn how to be angry within culturally acceptable limits. As we mellow into adulthood we acquire those skills that make us acceptable to and comfortable within our social networks. Among the rules to be learned are those for the modulated expression and experience of shame and pride.
Intuitively we know that these abilities are learned over a long period of time. Our expectations of teacher and toddler differ because very young children lack some of the cognitive equipment needed to handle the advanced techniques of affect modulation. Babies have only global affects. Their emotional experiences are whole-body states, and they seem to understand these events as relating to the whole self. Only in the second year of life do they develop the ability to make things partial, to assign responsibility to a part of them rather than the whole. Only when a child can understand that he or she has a hand, that the hand is only a part of the whole being, and that something done by that hand can be “blamed” on that hand; only then can that little boy or girl understand that the source of shame can be the hand rather than the whole self.
One researcher who has devoted a great deal of attention to this part of the riddle is psychologist Michael Lewis. I like his explanation of hubris, which we mentioned earlier as “the sin of pride.” Hubris, says Lewis, is when we lose the idea that there is a difference between an attribute (a small part of us) and our whole self. In hubris, we think of ourselves as elevated in toto—as a better person deserving of different status—simply because we have won a game or a prize. That, of course, is what rankled so many people about the young Cassius Clay, who claimed that his boxing ability made him both beautiful and “the greatest.” The label of beauty is usually attached by viewers outside the self, and his pugilistic ability had yet to be tested adequately to justify the label of greatness he professed. It was his hubris, rather than the accuracy of his assertions, that made him obnoxious to some people. In both pride and shame, these most self-related of the emotions, the depth of the emotional experience will be related to the importance-to-the-self of whatever has been magnified or impeded.
For the most part, I have restricted my discussion of the shame experience to situations in which the impediment to positive affect is independent of interpersonal interaction, such as those all-important moments during which the infant is trying out new skills without regard for the presence of others. While it is true that half the infant’s waking moments are spent in solitary play, the other half are expended in communion with the caregivers. The infant’s perception of the external world is also shaped by social experience, by the way the caregivers respond to the patterns created by the tensions of the drives and the urgency of affects. There is much more we can say about the importance of shame affect in the early months of life, the period during which infant and caregivers are learning how to regulate the physiologic mechanisms made urgent by extrauterine existence. Our concept of the relation between self and other is formed in such a context. To put it another way, the entire self/other matrix is an early organization of the infantile mind—one that will be affected powerfully by shame.
Since we have established that (regardless what triggers it) shame affect causes a momentary disorganization of infantile abilities and self-confidence, indeed producing what I have called the sense of an incompetent self, now we must ask how shame influences our perception of others. Of equal importance will be the attempt to demonstrate how our personal, individual experience of shame is affected by the other in whose presence we are embarrassed. Our understanding of “otherness” must be broad enough to take into account the various classes of other, the variety of others important from infancy through adulthood. Shame affect triggered in the context of social relationships becomes social shame, the realm and range of emotions thought to be shame itself by most people. Such will be our focus in the next chapter.
*This concept was introduced at the Basch–Stern course on child development given in August, 1900, at the Cape Cod Institute.