AVOIDANCE
Perhaps I best remember the day Margaret spilled the coffee because of the color of my beautiful carpet. Real wool, tightly woven, and a little too costly for my first very own office, it achieved its overall soft green look by blending reddish-brown lines against a light green background to make a pattern of miniature checks. Although situated in a center-city medical building, my waiting and consultation areas are set up as if they are rooms in our home, with almost no trace of traditional medical formality. The decor reflects my need for it to be a place where peers and equals gather to discuss matters of mutual interest. Clearly the sort of carpet one might purchase for a fine home rather than a commercial site, it provided the desired final touch. Not unlike a small boy threatened with humiliating censure for failing to take care of an expensive present, I had resolved to guard it carefully.
A couple of steps away from the chairs in which we sit is a tray with the makings for whatever warm beverages might suit a guest. In the first session or two I make and pour the instant decaffeinated coffee or tea for my companion. After the introduction to the system, it is expected that each of us will feel free to use it at will.
And so, that afternoon 20 years ago, Margaret was standing at the tray, talking animatedly while mixing and pouring her coffee. All of a sudden, she lurched, spilling a glop of liquid. Quite used to so normal an occurrence, and geared in my response to such spills like a volunteer fire company, I leaned forward to initiate my coffee-blotting drill. But to my surprise Margaret paid no attention to the accident and continued to talk as if nothing had happened. No guilt, no embarrassment, no morsel of responsibility.
“Excuse me,” I said. “What? ” “Look at the carpet. You just spilled the coffee.” Right heel planted squarely on the floor, she pivoted sharply so the quarter-sized café-au-lait spot was covered completely by her foot. “Where?” she said. “There, under your foot.” Margaret lifted her left foot. “I don’t see anything.” “The other foot.” “Oh!” she said in some surprise. “Huh. Look at that!” I proceeded to erase the spot. It was clear that there was no way she would ever be willing to discuss or even remember that incident, which was never mentioned again. Instinctively I knew that the 35-year-old social worker who had entered my office that day suddenly had been replaced by a guilty little girl, and that I was better off paying attention to the frightened child than the sophisticated adult.
But it is interesting for us to enquire where the spot went between the moment it was created and when she agreed to notice it. How does the mind manage to repudiate reality? Obviously, we do not pay attention to everything equally all the time—there must be some hierarchy of values in life. We can easily conceive of crisis situations (like fire, earthquake, or war) in which the act of spilling coffee would be quite trivial in the context of the truly dangerous and terrifying reality. In such a situation the affect triggered by the spill would not compete with the overwhelming affect already in process. But Margaret gave no evidence that she was so engulfed. Her avoidance of the spill was of another sort.
My field uses words in its own particular way, and we reserve the term denial for the group of situations in which a defense mechanism interferes with our perception of something. The word itself is derived from roots indicating its relation to the idea of saying “no.” Denial implies refusal of anything asked for or desired, the assertion that something is untrue, the contradiction of the existence or the reality of a thing. The form of repudiation utilized by Margaret is known as disavowal, a more specific term that indicates one’s inability to comprehend information that remains unwanted because it triggers unwanted affect.*
In our culture, the most famous example of disavowal appears at the end of the classic film Gone with the Wind. Rhett Butler has just rejected a final insincere plea of Scarlett O’Hara, indicating that she is self-centered, greedy, immature, and unable to sustain an adult relationship. Immediately on his departure, Scarlett first recoils in disbelief, acknowledging the importance of his remarks, and then says “I can’t think about it now. I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” We, the audience, know that what he has said may never cross her mind again, and certainly will never act as information that might help her grow into a better person.
In this episode, Scarlett remains aware of the incident itself—there is no interference with perception. Nevertheless, she has repudiated the emotional meaning of his rejection, which removes it from consciousness as effectively as if it had not been perceived. Rhett Butler’s decision brings her no feeling of rejection; it does not break the interpersonal bridge; it does not achieve meaning because she has prevented it from triggering shame. Stripped of its affective accompaniment, his comments lack urgency for her. Other matters are free to engage her attention.
Disavowal is a major force in human life. All of the psychological defense mechanisms described by Freud, the investigation of which forms such an important part of psychoanalytic therapy, are really strategies through which we attempt to avoid unwanted or uncomfortable affect. They are scripts that operate out of our awareness, in the realm of unconscious life. Psychoanalytic scholars, like Wurmser and Basch, believe that each of them is brought into play only after the decision to disavow.
In a way, disavowal is like lying to the self. Lying, blaming, and the many other ways we avoid responsibility are ubiquitous precautions against shame. “One day,” said Rachel, “when I was six years old, I was playing around with my mother’s sewing machine and got the needle stuck in my finger. Somehow I got my finger out, but it hurt something awful and it was still bleeding so I had to get her so she would help. So I ran to her and said, ‘Mommy! The sewing machine just jumped up and bit me.’ ” The little fib, so obvious to an adult, is clearly an attempt to shift her mother’s anger away from Rachel toward the suddenly animated mechanical device. The feared reprisal, so central to the experience we call guilt, is deflected from the self. It is doubtful that Rachel really believed her own story, which is why we cannot regard it as disavowal.
I do not mean to leave the impression that disavowal is intrinsically bad, for life quite often presents us with conditions in which no good is served by continual preoccupation with something that must, by its nature, trigger negative affect. The ability to disavow can be something like having an ace up your sleeve during a big poker game. There are lots of ways of handling unpleasant affect, all of which work pretty well. Occasionally, in a situation where nothing else seems likely to manage or prevent discomfort, we can protect ourselves by pretending that the trigger to it never occurred.
Consider the case of a man who is riddled with cancer, disfigured both by the disease and by antineoplastic treatment, but who disavows the terrible implications of his illness so that he may enjoy whatever time remains him. Ours is a culture that tends to regard with disfavor anything that fails to confront, so some people might say that he is wrong to avoid this knowledge. Surely, however, it would be arch and insincere of us to say that such a person would be more “emotionally healthy” were he to give up this disavowal and think more deeply about his illness! There are a number of foundations that minister to the needs of terminally ill children by granting some long-cherished wish, such as the opportunity to meet a movie star or to visit some famous landmark. By infusing excitement and joy into the lives of those who have been living with fear, pain, and distress, by distracting them to this new focus of attention, these organizations bring the grace of temporary disavowal.
STRATEGIES FOR AVOIDANCE
Shame, for many people the most unpleasant of the affects, is by far the leading reason for disavowal. The strategies through which we humans attempt to avoid, disguise, prevent, elude, or circumvent embarrassment and guilt form an assortment of scripts that I have grouped at the avoidance pole of the compass of shame. Included here are all the ways one can say no to shame.
In the matter of shame avoidance there are two masters to be served. For each of us, some portion of our experienced shame comes from our own assessment of ourselves, while another portion follows exposure to others. It is for this reason that Wurmser (1989) refers to the process of disavowal as “blinding the eye of the mind,” At the avoidance pole are some scripts that fool others, some by which we fool ourselves, and a few in which both are fooled. It is very much like the song from The King and I in which Anna describes the awkward embarrassment she feels when anybody knows she is frightened: “Whenever I feel afraid, I whistle a happy tune. . . . And when I fool the people I fear, I fool myself as well.” Her display of positive affect—designed to charm and distract the attention of the viewing other—serves equally well as a disavowal of her own discomfort.
For that segment of shame which derives from discovery there are three basic tactical approaches: We can protect ourselves by guarding the perimeters of our personal world; by making sure there is nothing within them that will embarrass us; or by distracting people so that they will forget that they were interested in what may lie within. At the healthy end of the spectrum lie openness and modesty. To ensure those qualities in some forums, there is the group of “sunshine laws” that preserve the rights of citizens to witness what goes on during the meetings of legislative committees. When nothing need be hidden, we are less likely to be suspicious of our leaders. So much do we become inured to the way “normal” adults protect themselves from scrutiny that we describe those who live without any perceived need for such protection as “refreshingly open.”
The habit of modesty is defined by our dictionary as the quality of having a moderate opinion of oneself; a reserve springing from an unexaggerated estimate of one’s qualities; freedom from presumption, ostentation, arrogance, or impudence. It implies the existence of a certain reserve or sense of shame proceeding from instinctive aversion to anything that another person might view as shameful. To be modest one must have a pretty good idea of one’s real qualities and have no need to exaggerate those qualities. This requires an accurate evaluation of our place relative to others, as well as no need to be seen as other than we really are. Healthy modesty is summed up by the protagonist in the Lerner and Loewe musical play Paint Your Wagon, who sings of his abilities and accomplishments, “I’m more than a lot are, I’m less than some. I’m in between.” Such an attitude would constitute an ideal method for the avoidance of shame.
THE SENSE OF A DEFECTIVE SELF
But few of us feel entirely comfortable with ourselves, feel ready, willing, and able to accept what may be seen either by the viewing eye of the other or by our own eye turned inward. How we protect ourselves from shame may be understood easily by returning to Table 5. Everybody is made uncomfortable by failure or shortcomings in each of these eight categories, even though the degree to which we are discomfited may vary from one division to another. As we saw in the previous chapter, those for whom the ideas of helplessness and abandonment loom largest are most likely to use attack self scripts to modulate shame by guaranteeing affiliation through the willing acceptance of controlled amounts of shame. Yet other categories achieve greater significance for some people.
Many of us feel generally unloved and unacceptable to others. Naturally, such a feeling may be based on fact, for a number of us have grown up in families that seem unable to love, while quite a few have lived within subcultures that made them feel like aliens. Few children can be so dispassionate as to develop much real understanding of their environment; most use various strategies of denial or disavowal in order to avoid such “knowledge.” The child is faced with two contrasting alternatives: a frightening awareness that these parents are incapable of love, implying that they actually might not provide protection from danger; or the creative but false theory that his or her parents are really okay and that their unpleasant behavior is the reasonable response of good people to a bad or defective child.
Clearly, logic most often commands the second choice, which offers far greater emotional safety than the harsher reality. Children will adopt a sense of themselves as being personally defective in order to explain away parental failure. Indeed, so tenacious can be this decision to disavow that often it functions as a core delusion—a fixed, false belief, central to the personality of an individual, unassailable by logic and held in place by a variety of powerfully magnified affects. To grow up in a dangerous home implies nearness to death and an atmosphere of terror, while to grow up believing one is a defective child in a good home implies a life of shame rather than peril.
This compromise works pretty well in childhood, when we are totally dependent on parental protection. The adoption of a sense of personal defect allows the child to trade unbearable fear—the terror of abandonment and death—for merely uncomfortable shame. Yet when we have achieved adult size and adult power, this compromise seems a little less advantageous. As adults, we have far less to fear, while with advancement in years the discomfort produced by shame mounts continually, requiring us to develop strategies for its minimization. If my generalized sense of shame stems from a childhood decision to accept the overarching concept of a defective self, then I can reduce this self-inflicted noxious feeling only by improving myself. Adults who grew up in an unloving, unempathic home often mount a relentless search for specific personal defects that can be overcome as if the achievement of perfection in the present might erase the bad old days of the past.
I have always been mystified, astonished, by the disavowal required in the adage “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never harm you.” Bones heal. Names stick with you forever. The shaming taunts and epithets used by those we love often come to invade our sense of self and reduce our self-esteem. Attacked for a real weakness or some fancifully declared inferiority, we tend to attribute to that deficit all the shame in our lives. Not surprisingly, we grow up attaching to that insufficiency a degree of significance directly proportional to the amount that we feel unloved and unlovable. So it is that a huge segment of our population finds shame unbearable and spends much of its time and energy attempting to increase self-esteem through techniques of accumulation and repair.
It is category D, the sense of a defective self, and category H, the idea that one is denied personal closeness because one is at core unlovable, that cause the most pain to those who have elected to use the system of shame avoidance. It is this section of the populace that Kaufman has described as living with internalized shame (1985, 33-69). One can do little or nothing to reduce the history of feeling unloved, the reality of parental neglect and exploitation. But anyone can arrange to be a winner at something, or exercise to become bigger and stronger, purchase goods and services leading to a presentation of self that conveys the image of beauty, or become extremely independent, or develop remarkable sexual prowess, or move into the public eye as an object of positive regard. Anyone who has a sense of personal defect, the feeling that he or she is unloved because of something that really cannot be altered, can work to distract our attention away from that supposed defect so that we will concentrate on that of which the individual is proud. And the device chosen, the system through which that person will attempt to turn us away from awareness of such a central defect, will always involve one of the six categories other than D and H.
Of course, such preoccupations are independent of any “real” defect, disturbance in the bodily plan, or failure in biological development that might make others better equipped than us. One may grow up blind in a loving environment and become a Helen Keller. Crippled at birth by cerebral palsy, a person might, like Christy Brown, become a celebrated writer; Franklin Delano Roosevelt transcended the paralysis of poliomyelitis to become a world leader. When defect is “merely” another way of being different, when a family refuses to allow a child to feel like a defective person for fault in a bodily system, there is little shame associated with imperfection. And when a real disability can be conquered, the increase in self-esteem so achieved remains with one for life.
CONVENIENT IMPERFECTIONS
The defects and imperfections to which I refer are more subtle. They involve matters such as the minor imperfections that make us individual, the variations in facial or bodily contour that have little meaning unless or until one is searching for something on which to pin one’s feelings of inadequacy. Conferring no true debility, they provide rather some sort of psychological relief because they allow us to shift from a general sense of inadequacy to an idea of a discrete and limited failing.
This can construct a topsy-turvy world, as I learned many years ago while interviewing the parents of a 19-year-old recently admitted to the hospital for an acute schizophrenic episode. At 13 she had insisted that a plastic surgeon give her a “better” nose. I asked her mother why the family had encouraged this procedure. “Because we thought it would make her love us more,” she answered.
Each era of civilization favors its own system for the remediation of this realm of personal defect; each culture chooses the domains within which we are encouraged to perfect ourselves. A hundred years ago one might exercise with “Indian clubs,” which resembled elongated weighted bowling pins, while in my youth Charles Atlas advertised a weight-lifting program that promised to turn a “98-pound weakling” into a “real” man. Later, the Marines offered to “make a man out of you.” With each advance in technology we see more and more efficient systems of body development. My local magazine store displays rack upon rack of journals emblazoned with photographs of strikingly muscular men and women, the equipment they used to achieve such brawn, and the disciplines to which they subjected themselves. Some portion of our societal obsession with physical fitness derives from the nearly universal wish to use the development of bulging muscles to diminish the shame that comes from invisible defects.
Are you afraid of personal attack not because we live in an era of physical danger but because you have been brought up to feel like a weak person? Study one of the martial arts—judo, karate, aikido, or boxing. Do you fear exposure of what you feel is a meager intellect? Read any of the books that promises a better vocabulary in 30 days so that you may talk like a more intelligent person. Has the acquisition of wealth, and consequent entry into another realm of society, left you all the more embarrassed about the size or shape of your nose, breasts, buttocks, or chin; the wrinkles rewarding your struggle; a mole or a blemish of any sort? Cosmetic surgery can tailor a new surface for you to show the world.
The search for mastery of any martial art can be rewarding in and of itself; our understanding of the world may indeed be directly proportional to the number of its words we understand; and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with beauty. It is not the goal but the purpose of such quests that must be questioned here. Most of those who undertake the journeys so implied do so with the expectation that the increment in skill, competence, or personal qualities so achieved will produce a happier self. Nearly anybody can learn enough karate to earn some degree of recognition—the problem here is that it may achieve significance only when we seek and find physical danger. Even the act of absorbing a thesaurus often fails to teach us about the world it describes. And plastic surgeons take meticulous before-and-after photographs to prove that the patient did obtain the sought-for physical change, even when the hoped-for emotional lift did not occur.
Children live more in the here-and-now than adults, forgetting in moments of failure their history of success; they need trophies, diplomas, and plaques as palpable evidence of the milestones and triumphs by which they define their ever-changing selves. Most adults live without any need to inform others of their accomplishments—imagine our world were each of us to wear on our sleeve an entire curriculum vitae, much as a soldier’s dress uniform displays medals and the signs of rank!
Come to think of it, these days literally anything can be printed on a T-shirt. Consider an industry offering to provide clothing that displayed truthfully your name, date of birth, where you went to school, how you did at each grade level, your job history, and the archives of your romantic ventures. In our culture, such an image would be considered bizarre, for it is through such conventions as mode of dress, accent, choice of home and automobile, and type of occupation that normally we make conscious and intentional public definition of ourselves. Most of us want total control over our broadcast image. The intentional exaggeration illuminates my point. The healthiest adults display only themselves and allow us to form our own conclusions about them.
Yet what are we to think of one who lives with a huge cabinet of trophies earned for some activity, or a wall of framed awards, or who leaves all over the living room copies of magazines in which he or she has been featured? Past a certain age or station in life, why is it necessary for some to remind us constantly that they attended one of the most prestigious educational institutions? I do not mean to gainsay anyone the right to be proud of any accomplishment. But no one goes to the trouble and expense of advertisement unless there is something to sell, unless one feels certain that the viewing other might otherwise remain unaware of the self defined by the attribute being exhibited. Frequently, the purpose of such display is to distract the attention of the viewing other toward certain features of the self; the display itself gives much evidence of shame hidden elsewhere.
Often I have worked in therapy with brilliant, successful men and women who were raised in simply terrible, oppressive homes where parental selfishness and cruelty had been embedded in a culture of poverty. In each case there was an instinctive push on the part of my patient to achieve wealth in order to purchase items of quality that defined status—art, antiques, rugs, automobiles, clothing, jewelry, and even a personal jet airplane. Whereas each purchase provided the dollop of pride for which it had been designed, nothing really reduced the immensity of the shame always lurking beneath the carefully presented surface. Eternally shame-sensitive, ever on the alert for any potential slur, any allegation that might reveal the fragility of their self-esteem, they were, as adults, just as brittle and cautious as they had been as children. Such a dependence on the establishment of status through the visibility of wealth has always been called nouveau riche. Few people raised in abject humiliation ever learn to step aside from their history and to see their chronic shame in proper perspective.
There are, then, two styles of shame avoidance related to these observations—the acquisition and display of trophies that define a wished-for self and that call to the attention of everybody this new gestalt; and the pressured pursuit of new levels of ability, competence, and wealth in order to prevent recognition of some deeply felt internal defect visible only to the struggling individual. Display and competition can become strategies undertaken to distract both the viewing other and the inner judge.
Were these methods more successful in defining a new self, in eradicating all the shame residing within one who had grown to adult status as an unloved child, one might expect that they would, after a time, simply cease. Tomkins said it well: The incomplete reduction of chronic and enduring shame brings excitement, while the complete reduction brings contentment and surcease (1962, 293). It is the deficiency, the incompleteness, the relative poverty of these techniques for shame avoidance that maintain the individual’s affect system in a state of excitement and require ever more costly trophies and quests. Complete relief, the sense of being a loved and whole person, has little to do with such struggle.
Again, I am suggesting more that these time-honored methods of solution for the problems caused by internalized shame are inadequate than that they are unsuccessful. No matter how a man gets to be king, absolute power now makes him beyond shaming censure. (Thus the aphorism “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”) With enough wealth to build a citadel within which you may be isolated from all but those who salute your excellence, you have evaded shame. What is regarded as deficiency, immaturity, “neurosis,” weirdness, instability, or weakness in an “ordinary” person is labeled “eccentricity” and tolerated with grace in the very, very wealthy and powerful.
IDENTIFICATION AND NARCISSISM
Most of us have neither the equipment nor the opportunity to become rich, beautiful, strong, extraordinarily competent at something, to become as independent as a mountain man, or to develop some skill that takes us into the approving eye of the public. It is fascinating to observe that such accidents of fate need not remove us from the ranks of those who can use these techniques of shame avoidance. Identification and narcissism provide two additional routes on our map, two methods by which we wander further and further away from sober acceptance of personal reality. So common are these scripts that we take them for granted as stable forces within society, often overlooking their relation to shame.
What we cannot attain on our own may be admired in distant others with whom we form the peculiar sort of relationship called identification. Unable to build into myself certain attributes and powers, I may adopt the self-enhancing fantasy that I share the traits of a cherished idol. As a small child, I may wear the clothing of Superman, Rambo, GI Joe, or Wonder Woman and imagine myself with the wondrous powers and public esteem of that ideal role model. One of the reasons we adults love to read about the great and famous is that the more we know about them, the more we can imagine ourselves living in their world. The deficiencies of our personal identity are somewhat reduced by a fantasized immersion in the identity of someone without those particular defects.
The comic books of my youth told of the crippled newsboy Billy Batson, who could say the magic word Shazzam! and turn into the invincible Captain Marvel. Clark Kent is the quintessential nebbish until he reveals himself as the Man of Steel who flies. In an earlier era, when sexual promiscuity ran unchallenged by the current crop of deadly venereal diseases, the James Bond films provided men with a model whose brawn, stealth, courage, sophistication, competitive skill, personal attractiveness, and certainty of his right to be loved and admired were combined with a willingness to accept sexual stimulation as a form of recreation quite free of guilt and shame. The greatest fictional heroes are inversions of the defective self that lies within each of us.
To a large extent, the advertising industry depends on the intensity of the pain caused by chronic shame and our avidity for anything that might make us feel better about ourselves. In its simplest form, the testimonial lets us know that somebody we admire or respect has found some product or service useful and better than its competitors. The use of that entity is therefore linked to the esteemed person. One way we can make ourselves at least a little bit like this valued other is to take on that piece of behavior. In the act of imitation we get to imagine that we share our hero’s competence, glory, beauty, or power. Often the advertisement says this quite clearly: “Do what I do and you can be like me.” or “You can share this feeling by imitating me.”
Transient or temporary identifications of this sort may serve a useful purpose in allowing us to pre-experience some station in life quite capable of attainment; this is one way we prepare ourselves for the future. A young lawyer imagines the kind of boat she will buy when elected a full partner in the firm. Another woman writes over and over again the new name she will bear when marrying her intended. In both cases, anticipation of the event allows easier integration into the new identity. An adolescent boy reviews again and again scenes from the films in which his hero asks a girl for a date, then practices in front of a mirror until the required language and skill become his own.
But what is going on when someone previsualizes what can never occur, pretends to live in a dream that can never be actualized, sees him- or herself as having attributes that do not and plainly cannot exist? Occasionally some child dies jumping from a window ledge in hopeless imitation of Superman. We shake our heads silently at such a misfortune, but “know” with certainty that no adult could do this. Yet some people behave as if they were wealthy when they are not, act as if they were beautiful when they are not, pretend to skills they will neither demonstrate nor attain. To the extent that the altered image is bound to one’s identity as a whole and maintained with great urgency, we call this sort of distortion delusional.
If beauty can be bought or mimed and rank assumed by an impostor for the sake of shame, if anyone can lie or whistle care away and thus demolish guilt, if for wounded pride one can attempt any style of sexual performance, and if a publicist can for hire compose a beacon of fame for the most retiring self, then how can disavowal and delusion assist whoever lives in pain for deficiency of love? Shorn by shame from any opportunity to experiment with intimacy, prevented by fear of shame from the risk of love refused, one can pretend to self and others that love exists but far from view. Such is the puzzle presented by certain chronically shy, withdrawn adults who dream secretly that they are loved by the great and famous, but who come to our attention only when some event forces into the clear what previously had been hidden from view.
Called variously erotomania or de Clérambault’s syndrome, and known since antiquity, each of the reported cases I have reviewed suggests the pattern of a chronically shame-bound adult whose inner world is warmed by the secret fires of a thoroughly delusional love. So central to the personality lies the need to be loved, and so deep and intense the shame that is softened by the compensatory delusion, that those so afflicted rarely tolerate the process of relevation, the uncovering normal to psychotherapeutic investigation. Not surprisingly, since attention to shame itself has within my field until quite recently been sporadic and chronically insufficient, none of these patients has ever been treated with specific attention to shame as such. Here is another of the illnesses for which a new approach may be devised in terms of affect theory.
It is interesting that most of those who have discussed erotomania in the psychiatric literature make the observation that it has something to do with narcissism; they mention nothing about shame. No matter how broadly one tries to expand the concept of narcissism, it always bears the faint aroma of self-pampering, of conceit, self-love, and vanity—none of which speaks very well to the type and intensity of affect seen in such a delusional state. In terms of the work presented so far in this chapter, I propose a limited definition: narcissism is the system through which personal attributes are exaggerated in order to avoid shame.
As you know, Freud adopted the Greek legend of Narcissus as the basis for his concept of narcissism. In the original story, this handsome boy grew so infatuated with the image of his face reflected in a pool of water that he became unable to hear the voice of the lovely nymph Echo by his side and wasted away into death while immersed in self-regard. Her name now describes the situation in which we utter sounds that are reflected back to us without interpretation or understanding. In an interpersonal relationship, one cannot have an Echo without a Narcissus. Normal people respond to our utterances, while the narcissistic person seems unable to “take in” the significance of what we have said.
A simple error made by Freud has resulted in a century of confusion about narcissism. Unaware that infant and mother communicate through the language of innate affect, he saw the inability of the newborn to comprehend adult language as analogous to the seeming inability of the narcissist to accept messages from the outside world. This misunderstanding of infants and of the interaction between babies and their caregivers led him and his followers to believe that the infant enters life immersed in something that resembles self-regard. If we recognize that the normal infant is never narcissistic, it becomes clear that adult narcissism is only and always a protection against shame. Narcissism is the name we give to the broad array of scripts through which people prevent themselves from “knowing” about anything that might increase an already unbearable amount of shame.
When we say that someone is narcissistic, we imply the presence of beliefs about the self that cannot be substantiated, broadcasts of information that cannot be confirmed. Each of these convictions contains some kernel of truth, each has something to do with the eight categories of thought listed in Table 5. In order for an individual to be labeled narcissistic, however, the false, embroidered, exaggerated, disproportionately embellished ideas, the “fish stories” involved, must serve the function of drawing attention away from a centrally damaged self-concept. Narcissism is a term that must be reserved for that part of our self-image that would be relinquished were we to accept shame. It is an ill-fitting mask or a badly made toupee (indeed, a mask or toupee of any sort), a girdle or corset designed to show us as we wish to be rather than as we are, a swagger meant to disguise the slump of disgrace, a house full of imitation fine art and fake jewelry, a phony accent, anything we do to call attention to the self we wish to assume rather than the person we are.
Does narcissism imply freedom from shame? Of course not. Humiliation always lies immediately beneath the surface of deceit. Like the towns built for western movies, it is all front and no depth, a situation constructed to give the appearance of normality with little or nothing behind it. It does no good to poke at narcissism unless for some kind of sadistic sport. This is not a minor defense erected against mild distress. Freud spoke of the “stone wall of narcissism.” So protected is the individual from the possibility of shame that great segments of reality may be kept from consciousness.
No one can relinquish the apparent power conferred by a false self-image until something within the self has changed, until one experiences real love. Therapists who speak of “confronting narcissistic overevaluation of the self” know little about shame. People do not give up a single narcissistic boast until someone else has built a scaffolding around the structure of their being, conferring upon them enough power through empathic understanding that the false safety of an artificial surface becomes unnecessary.
The sheer extent of the means through which individual attributes can be exaggerated boggles the mind. Nowhere is the creative spirit so wondrously expressed as in our societal search for modes of personal magnification. The fashion industry provides us with ways we can “look our best” and declare our right to some desired level of social status. Whenever we act in a manner designed to impress somebody else, we are attempting to shift attention from something that brings us shame to something that can evoke pride. Automobiles, homes and home furnishing, jewelry, art, even the choice of pets can be used to alter one’s place on the shame/pride axis. Upward mobility is often a system of shame avoidance more than an attempt to reach one’s true potential. All of these constitute what I have defined here as narcissistic defenses against chronic shame, against the feeling that we can never be loved for ourselves. They are expensive, high-energy compromises for something that cannot be faced.
Little Rachel lied to her mother by claiming that the sewing machine had suddenly come to life and attacked her. Her lie was simple and obvious. Most of us shade the truth in order to look better to others. I have evaluated a great many scholarly articles about lying and been disappointed to find little or no reference to shame. Since lying usually involves an action that violates social laws, and therefore places one at risk of punishment, it is likely to trigger the form of shame we call guilt. We can lie about minor and trivial matters, just as we can lie to protect friends from unnecessary discomfort. Yet, in my experience, some coassembly of shame is the most frequent precursor to intentional misrepresentation of fact.
There are, however, people whose very identity is a lie, who live with a concept of self so false that they may be seen as impostors. These are the people Ibsen described as existing within a “life lie.” Often, too, I am asked to discuss sociopathy, another extreme of apparent shamelessness. How does one get to be a confidence man, a swindler, a seducer, a crook, the kind of person we used to call a psychopath? How can one so thoroughly defeat the representatives of conscience as to live “without shame”? How is it that some people seem so immune to shame that they can do whatever they want without fear of the pain that afflicts the rest of us?
Over the years that I have been in the clinical practice of psychiatry, I have worked in therapy with several such patients. Some have spent time in prison, others in bankruptcy, most (if not all) have been chronically unable to sustain any form of authentically intimate relationship. Those who see these people as free from shame do not know how to look for shame. In each case I have been impressed by the roaring fires of shame that live at the core of the self. For such people, lies provided more solace than had ever been received from their falsely nurturant childhood milieu. It is true that most of these patients were relatively free from the stigmata of fear, of conventional anxiety. But they lived with so much shame that it had become the center of their lives. The personality, the adopted role they showed the outside world, existed only as a thin veneer pasted over a sickly core.
So far as I can determine, the sociopath uses an avoidance script as if it were a model for life itself. Yet even a veneer of sophistication pasted over a core of shame is better than nothing; avoidance has its rewards. Not, though, from uncovering psychotherapy. Sometimes an individual simply cannot imagine dealing with the pain of inner looking, of self-examination, of entry into the “arena of shame” described by Anthony as the therapeutic environment. This synthetic character structure does not wear well. Those who use this dodge cannot sustain intimacy because they cannot allow anyone to peek beneath their cover; any revelation, any opening into the core, places them at risk.
What risk? You and I, when exposed or revealed or put down, suffer from shame triggered by the memories contained in Table 5 as they are organized into the scripts of the compass of shame. Difficult as that may be, it does not even begin to bear comparison to the highly magnified shame-based memories of the sociopath. Earlier, I described the “borderline” patient as one for whom shame had become a destructive force quite early in development. Working in therapy with a sociopath is very much like therapy with a “borderline” patient or someone with a dissociative illness like multiple personality disorder. In all of these conditions shame has magnified the danger of inner looking, made it easier for the patient to run and hide than to sit and ponder.
There are others who live with a core of shame covered over with the veneer of sophistication. Many of the most successful men and women in our society fulfill my criteria for this diagnosis. Often we call them “workaholics” or say that they are “driven to succeed.” Scratch the surface of the desperately driven business tycoon, the philandering politician, the relentlessly busy surgeon who cannot afford to slow down for a moment, the empire builder, the famous lawyer known as well for his adulterous lifestyle as for his flamboyant courtroom tactics, the religious leader who seems more interested in his image than his message—drill an exploratory hole into the inner lives of any of these icons of our culture and you are likely to tap a gusher of shame handled by avoidance. “Look at me,” they say, “but look only where I tell you to look.”
COMPARISON AND COMPETITION
Since so much of our self-concept is derived from comparison with others, and since it is through the medium of competition that we set up purposeful systems of comparison, it stands to reason that shame stemming from some perceived but irremediable deficiency of the self can be mitigated by shifting attention toward the pride and status achieved when one wins at something. Directly proportional to the amount of energy devoted to competition is always the degree of chronic shame linked to a persistently lowered self-image.
It is obvious, of course, that there are people whose athletic gifts confer on them the special ability to excel in areas where we ordinary mortals struggle, to soar where we trudge. And it might be suggested that for them competition has little or nothing to do with activity around the shame/pride axis, that victory produces triumph that has no meaning outside the specific contest in which it was achieved, and that losing is viewed only as a learning experience—a pleasant encounter with someone of superior ability. Such people, the theory might state, play games only for the joy of feeling their bodies work at peak performance, see their opponents as equals and friends, and look forward to each encounter with joyful anticipation of good, clean fun. This, I maintain, is sheer nonsense.
No one with such an attitude would bother to play games very much. All the “fun” of games, the interplay of affects that makes sports worthwhile or even exciting, is dependent on the oscillation between negative and positive affect. I hold a capitalist or entrepreneurial view of athleticism. If losing produces no negative affect, if winning does not provide exultation over that negative affect, then there is no urgency, no affective magnification capable of making competition rewarding. Few people engage in hard work without any expectation of a reward.
Haven’t we always said that people constantly involved in competition are “trying to prove something”? Winning defines a new sense of self that is to a great degree temporary simply because victory is declared by an outer judge, while the inner judge is more interested in the big issue—”Why am I not loved?” Yet the good feeling that comes from winning is a powerful painkiller, one that attracts the attention of huge masses of people.
The employees of most large corporations organize clubs for athletic competition—bowling, Softball, judo, arm wrestling, tennis, and whatever else catches the fancy of a group. These clubs become affinity groups that purchase clothing that links together their members and advertises that they are part of a loving family; teams have “home courts,” travel in groups to “away” games, and meet regularly for practice. Associations like country clubs, private skating clubs, racquet clubs, karate dojos, and a wide variety of others all provide opportunities for personal competition befitting a wide range of social classes and customs.
Here in Philadelphia there are dozens of neighborhood clubs that expend enormous amounts of time and money to compete in the annual Mummer’s Day Parade. Many of these have been in existence for over a century; membership is a cherished right handed down in families. And no matter what the function of a social organization, within the group itself will be much jockeying for positions of leadership. There may be no realm of our society without several analogous opportunities for competition. Our individual, personal involvement in such combat is sanctioned or legitimized by the ubiquity of the opportunities to compete.
Listen carefully to what is said during any of these competitions and you will learn a great deal about pride and shame. Play, in the sense of carefree abandon, has no place in these games. The participants are clearly involved in a leisure-time activity with tremendous urgency of purpose. One of the nice things about games is that they have distinct beginnings and endings, that they provide the possibility of shame or pride at predictable times. Whereas the feeling of being loved cannot be scheduled, bureaucratic systems see to it that our sporting matches conform to the needs of all the businesses and people involved.
More evidence that competition can be an attempt to avoid shame, a distraction from perceived inner weakness, an analogue of narcissism? Why else do so many people hire coaches, pay for lessons, read books and magazines that purport to improve their record in competition, rent or buy training films and videotapes? What else might excuse an extraordinary level of expenditure on sporting clothes? What about all the people who are so determined to win that they cheat at games, rig sporting events, pay bribes to gain public office, or fix elections? Competition means a great deal to those who use it as a system for the verification of competence.
BORROWED PRIDE
Nevertheless, to the extent that we are unable by our own efforts to demonstrate our competence, thus giving ourselves a sense of healthy pride, or to fake efficacy and achieve false pride, what we seem to do is borrow pride and prestige through some sort of identification with others whose efficacy we admire. Nowhere in contemporary Western society is the preoccupation with shame and pride to be as easily seen or studied as in our preoccupation with public sporting spectacles.
The overwhelming majority of the population, unable to participate in competitive sports and certainly unable to feel like winners, must satisfy its need to win through the vicarious experience of competition. Those of us who cannot or dare not compete on our own can hire others to fight or play or contend in our stead. The fabled kings of old, whose absolute power commanded the actions of their subjects, might find it entertaining to order into mortal combat one or another of their knights. Today it is the immense wealth of powerful businessmen or groups of investors working in concert that addresses and outfits the armies of our professional teams. It is by our purchase of tickets or through our patronage of those whose advertisements pay for television coverage of our favorite teams that we become personally involved in their exploits. Commercial sports events have taken hold of the public imagination to the extent that media coverage of them can make up the majority of our weekend reading and viewing.
What motivates such extraordinary expenditure of time, money, and energy on the public display of sports as entertainment? Even the television crews who broadcast the games have become interested in the audience, for the audience itself has become a participant in the overall spectacle. More and more people attend games that will be telecast in the hope that viewers will see them in the audience; to maximize the possibility of being noticed they wear theatrical costumes, make banners and signs, organize cheering sections and devise stunts—all to catch the attention of the television crew. It would seem that the average person feels so invisible, so fungible, that merely being seen on television is an efficacy experience.
When the relatively new and inexperienced local franchise of the professional hockey association won its first championship, two million people formed a conga line dancing through the streets of our city screaming its joy in victory. Whatever sense of inadequacy relative to any other person in our lives (or relative to any other city, or anything which creates in us a sense of lowered self-esteem and therefore chronic enduring shame) will be turned to joy in victory, the intensity of the joy directly proportional to the intensity and duration of the preceding chronic shame.
Yet it is not our own individual self-esteem that has been raised, but only our estimation of ourselves as we identify with our gladiators. Failing in our lifelong quest for the experience of efficacy in the context of interest–excitement or enjoyment–joy, we borrow pride from those we hire. Strangers, paid to perform in competition for teams whose aggregate skill is kept within precise limits by bureaucratic organizations, become regular household figures for the legion of those who dare not compete for fear of being ranked or who feel themselves so much the loser in competition that they must identify with a winner. By far the most important reason people invest so heavily in public displays of athletic endeavor is the role of such activity in allowing outward displacement of tension deriving from activity along the shame/pride axis.
STRATEGIES TO REDUCE SHAME
This really happened to me: I was 19, working on a research project in experimental embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In retrospect, it was a summer of triumph for a terribly shy adolescent—my first published scientific paper, a leading role in the local summer stock production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, and the winner’s trophy at the regional Ping-Pong tournament. But if you asked what affected me most I would probably turn beet red and tell you about Elissa.
She was blond, lovely, attentive, fascinated by my research, and able to turn me from Earth’s most incompetent dancer into someone quite willing to take a turn around the floor. We spent a wonderful amount of time together. This was the early 1950s, well before the sexual revolution, and kissing represented the epitome of our amorous activities. But kiss we did, and for me it was an incredible experience. Even Martin, two years older, taller, better looking, more “experienced,” and the proprietor of a larger laboratory and a bigger grant, was forced to acknowledge my good fortune at finding so lovely a companion.
Leaving my laboratory late one night, I spotted a desk light in Martin’s office and walked over to confer with him about some now long-forgotten idea. There I found him locked in passionate embrace with my Elissa. His was a reaction of mild guilt and evident triumph, while she hid her head in shock and shame. As for me, I was barely able to breathe for the pain that suffused every fiber of my being.
For the first time in my life, I walked immediately to the neighborhood tavern, where I took an unaccustomed seat at the bar and stared wordlessly at the bartender. I have no idea what he saw in my face, but without any further clue he placed before me a double shot of bourbon, which I swallowed in a gulp. Once again he filled my glass, once again I downed my medicine. Feeling immensely better and not a whit inebriated, I paid up and left without talking to anyone.
The obvious questions: Does massive humiliation have its own special facial expression, one best known to bartenders? How did he know that I “needed a drink”? Why did it help? Why didn’t I feel drunk after an amount of alcohol that might have leveled me at any other time?
The answers are less interesting than the questions. If you walk into a bar, the chances are that you have already decided that you need or want a drink. Bartenders are like auctioneers—the latter interpret your nonverbal gestures as meaning “bid” or “no bid”, the former interpret them as “drink” or “drink.” Why it helped is quite another matter.
The relation between shame and alcohol has been known since antiquity. (I have heard it said that, save for two isolated aboriginal cultures, every society on the planet has spontaneously found caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. It seems as if the biological nature of the affect system leaves us vulnerable to certain recurrent noxious experiences that are ameliorated by these chemicals.) The Latin proverb, in vino veritas (in wine there is truth), indicates both that shame affect can teach us to hold our tongue and that alcohol can unleash it. Booze is forever “allowing” us to say what we “shouldn’t.”
It is in the cultures that are the most afflicted by shame that we see the greatest amount of personality change with alcohol. The rules of Japanese society require absolute control over affective display lest any leak of feeling cause loss of face and therefore great shame. Yet, when drunk, Japanese are effusive.
Léon Wurmser once commented to me that “in Sweden there is a kind of great resentment about those who reach above mediocrity. Ingrained in the popular consciousness of many European democracies is an intense emphasis on equality, an attitude which is enemy to competition. In Europe one is really ashamed if one tries to win, if one does win.” Dr. Wurmser described a Swedish novel about the people of a “narrow, petty, bourgeois town where everybody who refused to accept the views of the majority would be ostracized, where any deviation from the norm might produce envy and resentment against the one who is better. In such a society, to exceed the norm produces shame.” And, in such a society, the risk of alcoholism is equally great.
Physiologists say that alcohol has a “disinhibiting effect,” that it acts as a “releaser” of emotion or of action. People are more likely to get angry when drunk, more likely to fight, to speak with feeling. It seems reasonable to assume that one of the primary actions of alcohol is to release us from the bonds of shame, that it is a “shamolytic” agent. We can take courage from a bottle because whatever reticence prevents us from action will be reduced by booze. Perhaps, to some degree, fear also is soluble in alcohol. But to the greatest extent, it is the shame-based painful inhibition of action that is soothed by alcohol.
That probably helps answer the last of the questions I raised a moment ago—why I didn’t feel drunk after a dose of alcohol far in excess of my normal limit. Within certain limits, alcohol works pretty well to reduce the pain of shame, and we need the medicine in direct proportion to the amount of pain. Obviously, when the source of the pain disappears, we can start to feel how much we have drunk; then, too, we can overestimate the amount of alcohol needed and drink past the medicinal level of effectiveness.
So one of the ways people can decrease the occasional acute bout of shame is to use alcohol. It doesn’t work as well for chronic enduring shame, as any member of Alcoholics Anonymous will be glad to explain. But, to an extent, most of us will, on occasion, drown our sorrows in alcohol. It reduces a variety of nonspecific tensions quite well, although I suspect that the majority of them are related to shame anyway.
Take, for instance, the ubiquitous social gathering called “a party.” Most of us are at least a little shy, afraid to talk with strangers (even, occasionally, with friends) at first. Alcohol is served as an “ice breaker.” (The affect fear–terror makes us cold.) Our use of metaphors like “cold” and “warm” indicates the extent to which anticipated, feared embarrassment interferes with the warm, pleasant interchange afforded by mutual interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy. Here, too, we drink to reduce shame.
But have you ever taken a couple of drinks in one of those rare moments when you were in a really good mood, when nothing was bothering you, when you actually felt calm? Then alcohol only makes us dog tired, unpleasantly unable to function. Unless there is a negative affect in need of control, alcohol is a sedating agent, one that reduces our ability to function in any situation that requires critical thinking. It is like most medicines in that it works when we are sick and produces little more than side effects when we are not.
For this reason, there is a lot of confusion about the nature of “fun.” The moral philosophy of hedonism suggests that it is okay to pursue anything that feels good. Every few years or so a new drug is released, its inventors promising that it can take us from boredom to ecstasy in moments without risk of danger. What most people do not understand is that these drugs only “work” if one starts out in a really bad mood. All of them make you feel simply terrible if you start out feeling good. Hedonism, then, is usually a way of decreasing chronic shame and distress, rather than a search for pleasure. It represents an attempt to avoid whatever might be learned from introspective study of the lessons to be learned from shame.
There are other ways to substitute hedonism for shame. Joy-rides, thrill-seeking, dangerous pastimes of any sort, and a host of other activities form the macho system of defense in which excitement and anger substitute for shame. In many respects, the use of certain drugs, like cocaine and the amphetamines, can represent an attempt to escape shame through the pharmacologic instigation of excitement. Sometimes this excitement is used for its own sake, occasionally to power some suddenly interesting activity, and often it is used for the pharmacological enhancement of sexuality. Sexual arousal, so deeply enmeshed in the world of affect, provides an excellent way to avoid shame.
SEXUAL SCRIPTS FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF SHAME
Return, once again, to Table 5 and look at category F, the part of shame that has to do with sexuality. So much shame and pride are associated with sex. A man or woman with a new lover often walks with lilting step, head raised high, eyes twinkling, interested in everything around, ready to find pleasure everywhere, broadcasting to the world a newly confirmed certainty of sexual competence. Much more is involved than pure sexuality, for approval in this critical area of the self can generalize, can spread from the exclusively sexual to other areas of the person. In short, sexual competence can either make us forget about other areas of inadequacy or at least make them seem less important for the moment.
This is a perfect situation for those whose sense of self has been wounded in ways that cannot be repaired easily. So it is that many people will broadcast sexual availability and interest as a distraction (for self and other) from more deeply internalized shame. There are many trades available here. Should a young woman be willing to dress, walk, talk, dance, and gesture in an overtly sexual manner, she will swap her “reputation” for power with men. She can tolerate the “bad names” she is called because this behavior is under her own control—this particular type of shame is far easier to accept than what she has felt within her nuclear family. Her sexual partner is likely to be a young man who makes clear that his interest in a woman has only to do with her sexual availability and that he is but marginally interested in her as a fellow human with whom he might commune as an equal. What he gains in sexual experience he will lose in the realm of empathic relatedness.
Yet those who engage in these transactions are usually people who have already been so injured in the area of self-esteem that they see their conduct only as a victory over the shame of seeming undesirable. This is the world of machismo, in which fear of being unloved or unlovable leads women to become teasing, histrionic, flirtatious, seductive, or “sexy” in an attempt to guarantee attention rather than provide introduction to a lasting relationship. It is male machismo, the world of bravery for the sake of attention, danger for notoriety, sexual advertisement for the purpose of creating an aura of generalized competence and personal pride.
The best place to study the processes involved is not the consultation room of a psychiatrist but the racks of your neighborhood magazine store. One after another, the covers of these slick publications show beautiful women scantily and alluringly dressed for seductions that they have engineered from scripts laid out for them in the accompanying text. These are training manuals for female machismo. Accompanying them are the equivalent journals for men, which feature the clothing, facial attitudes, language, and behavior necessary for masculine involvement in the culture of machismo.
Nobody uses these systems of avoidance unless they prevent or reduce pain so noxious that there seems no other way of handling it. Unless you are one of those who believes that shame is good for people, don’t merely confront someone who uses these devices. In the main, you are dealing with people who have been exposed to so much shame at critical points in early development that their entire expectational set for intimacy includes the idea of rupture. If you try to explain that they are using self-defeating tricks to avoid shame, they are likely to prevent further interaction with you.
When I work with those whose methods of handling shame fall into this group of scripts, it seems essential to define the nature of shame with great care, describing in miniature what we have worked so long in this book to develop. Usually they are glad to know that others find shame painful as well. It is important to explain that, given their particular history, it really is easy to understand why they might try too hard to avoid shame. Also is it helpful to explain that each of us suffers shame, that it is not something known only to “sick people,” and that they do not need to feel inferior to the apparently calm, apparently superior therapist.
One final group of scripts remains. We must now turn our attention to those who handle shame by attacking others through the techniques of put-down, ridicule, contempt, and character assassination. These are the people in our society most of us find truly dangerous, for no one can really avoid shame successfully, and we live at risk of their wrath. Those who must attack rather than withdraw make our common turf into a terrain of danger.
*This distinction between denial and disavowal is discussed at length by Basch (1983b). See also Edelstein et al. (1989) for a thorough review of these concepts.