Shame and Pride

ATTACK OTHER

Join me at the movies for a while. Here is actor Clint Eastwood, a handsome, athletic man famous for two signature characteristics—the impassive face that accompanies his emotionless delivery, and the off-repeated line (“Go ahead. Make my day.”) that precedes his explosions into deadly violence. On another screen we see Charles Bronson, whose best-known roles show him as a mild-mannered and courteous gentleman who bears with grace the insults of a marauding world until some critical point is reached and he bursts into a murderous rampage. More recently, such actors as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris have established stable characterizations of protagonists whose superb physical conditioning and skill at the martial arts allow them to erupt into savage fury to protect themselves and others from indignity. Milder examples? Pause, for a moment, over the scene in the film Network, in which Peter Finch plays television personality Howard Beale, who cracks under the strains of life and exhorts the members of his wide, unseen audience to open their windows and shout, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

For men only? “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” reads the old adage. Despite that men will kill for reasons other than revenge or the remediation of humiliation, films rarely show a woman committing murder for any other motive. Occasionally brutal toward physical inferiors, like children or slaves, and sadistic toward those who are bound to them by other ties, women in the cinema are likely to be portrayed as exhibiting cruelty only when shame has driven them mad. (Indeed, one of our cultural gender stereotypes defines violent conduct as normal for men and abnormal for women.) Although Bette Davis was famous for her scorn, no actress, to my knowledge, has been willing to limit her career to roles in which she explodes with deadly force. Yet there is a broad range of situations in which women attack with other weapons. In Dangerous Liaisons, for example, Glenn Close won the Oscar as best actress for her portrayal of a marquise who engineered the death and destruction of many as revenge against a man whose withdrawal from their relationship caused her unbearable humiliation.

Turn your attention from films to sports: A “bad loser” is someone who gets angry after competitive failure. Golfers often throw or break clubs after a bad shot; undisciplined table tennis players will smash their paddles against the edge of the table (ruining both paddle and table) when particularly humiliated by failure; the fights that break out between professional hockey and football players are so commonplace that we think of them as part of the game itself. Such behavior is only rarely restrained—famed coach Vince Lombardi said, “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

Am I asking that the reader develop tunnel vision and see only shame? At first glance one might say that there is much more here than the association between shame and anger. Everyone who has ever watched a toddler knows that children learn quite early that anger can be used as an instrument for the accomplishment of goals unreachable during milder moments. Isn’t the anger of athletes merely “frustration”? Don’t bad people “deserve” to be attacked by their victims? Notwithstanding the power of such long-standing truisms, when you really study the wide range of interpersonal situations in which we see anger erupt, shame seems to figure in almost all of them.

Miscellaneous associations: An old Chinese proverb suggests that “he who lands the first blow was the first to run out of arguments.” In the Old West, a gun was called an “equalizer”; only the shame associated with physical inferiority can explain such a use of language. A fleeting scene from a nameless movie remembered only for this interaction: The chronicle of an adolescent girl emerging from terrible shyness into normal interaction, it showed her at a high school dance, able to feel whole and alive for the first time. “Do you put your hair up at night?” she asked the most popular girl in the school while whirling past her in some complex dance routine. “Of course,” came the reply. Our newly confident young woman responded “Better put it up higher. It looks like the dog got at it!” With this gesture, our heroine actually defined her new self by stating that she felt able to compete with the leader of the pack. The movie is teaching its viewers that we are not mature until we can attack others, until we are capable of increasing our own self-esteem at the expense of others.

Yet few of us go through life doing nothing but diminishing others. Most of us are reluctant to belittle, disparage, deprecate, threaten, or actually injure people unless and until some intensely private point of no return has been reached and passed. It is the myriad of scripts that spell out for each of us this system of reaction to shame that I group under the classification attack other, and that will occupy our attention in this chapter. There are three areas of enquiry: What sort of stimuli act as triggers to attack, and what are the conditions for its release? What is the range of reactions involved? How do these reactions alter our inner and our outer world?

TRIGGERS AND CONDITIONS

Those who are able to accept all the uncomfortable thoughts listed in Table 5 withdraw into some private space so that shame can run its course. When we agree to accept shame within relationships that demand deference it is because we most fear isolation or abandonment. And when no portion of the shame experience is tolerable, we use the strategies of avoidance to prevent or attenuate the affect. On what portion of our list must we focus to understand the scripts and politics of attack?

Look again at category A. For many people, it is when we feel most brittle about the adequacy of what classical psychoanalysis calls the “body ego” that we favor the use of attack other scripts. The earliest ways we come to know ourselves, these are primitive matters, clearly related to core issues of personal identity associated with our physical and mental equipment. They are the concerns that define us in relation to others on the basis of size, strength, ability, and skill—concerns about whether we feel large or small, strong or weak, proficient or incompetent, articulate or dumb. These are the realms of self-definition most associated with real danger to life and limb.

In the chapters on the nature of the self and the relation between shame affect and the sense of self, I pointed out that shame quite early becomes linked with the idea of an incompetent self. Further, I presented the idea that the earlier in development one could trace the link between shame and a particular personal attribute, the more primitive and unmodulated was our affective reaction likely to be. If something happens that makes us feel like a child in danger, as adults we react to this threat with all the power and skill developed since childhood.

When called into play, the compensatory mechanism usually involves what Wurmser (1981) calls “turning the tables” on the other person. These are the reactions that best conform to the idea of “talionic law.” Have we have been made to feel small? The other will be made to feel even smaller. Have we been made the butt of a joke, laughed at by others? Then the rebuttal will reduce our tormentor even further. Is it a matter of wit or strength? The ensuing repartee will be characterized by barbs or blows tossed with increasing fervor until someone cries “uncle!” Has life itself been placed in seeming jeopardy? Then death must come to whomever has threatened us.

In Act 5, Scene 8 of Macbeth, Macduff and Macbeth are trading insults during swordplay. Macbeth says:

I will not yield,

To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet,

And to be baited with the rabble’s curse. . . .

. . . Before my body

I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,

And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Not too many years ago, “The Incredible Hulk,” a popular comic book, was turned into a television series. The premise underlying both is elegant and simple: David Banner, a mild-mannered physician, had narrowly escaped death in an automobile accident. His beloved wife, however, was trapped inside the car and killed; Banner’s normal human strength was not sufficient to allow him to rescue her before it burst into flames and exploded. Dr. Banner’s helpless, impotent rage was piteous, even more so because, as a physician, he has a special relation with life and death. Shortly afterwards, in a laboratory accident, Banner received a dose of radiation that changed his metabolism so that, each time he becomes angry, he turns into a hulking green monster. The Hulk can rip the door from a car as easily as he can toss a tree or bend a rod of steel.

Yet Dr. Banner remains mild-mannered, save for the rare moments when someone tries to intimidate or humiliate him and he becomes angry. Then he is temporarily transformed into an immensely powerful humanoid creature with the emotional and intellectual maturity of an infant. (“Don’t make me angry,” he says to an obnoxious, persistent, enquiring reporter who suspects he is the Hulk. “You wouldn’t like me if I got angry.”) It is as if David Banner is given the choice between witless power and powerless wit. Like so many highly successful fictional characters, the Incredible Hulk is all of us who have ever writhed in silent rage at our inability to demolish a persecuting enemy or chafed at the injustices to which we are forced to submit.

Rarely has there been so clear a statement of the transition to the set of scripts housed at the attack other pole of the compass of shame as that made by the heartless television producer Diane Christianson in the opening scenes of the film Network. In the speech that prepares the audience to accept Howard Beale’s aforementioned exhortation for the visible demonstration of disgust and rage, she tells her staff about the shift in public attitudes she has predicted:

The American people are turning sulky. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Viet Nam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression. They’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing’s helped. This concept analysis concludes the American people want someone to articulate their rage for them.

The shift from shame to rage carries a significant degree of risk. Notwithstanding our wish for power, we are all afraid of the Hulk within us. Earlier, when we discussed The Terminator, it was clear that this murderous metal-framed robot was incapable of emotion, even though it had been given intelligence and strength of the highest order. Yet the Terminator attacked only those targets for which it had been programmed; the more primitive Hulk has little control over its actions.

In the normal adult, strength has developed in tandem with intelligence, both tempered by the presence of an affect system. Shame usually prevents, protects us from, rage because the affect comes to form such coassemblies as reticence, anticipatory guilt, remorse, and the understanding that public awareness of our rage-filled misdeeds might lead to rejection. Rage triggered by shame, then, is a paradoxical formation.

We are looking for the chain of events (a sequence stored within a script) that can undo the normal social training responsible for this inhibition. Any switch into the attack other mode of functioning can occur only after such a string has acted like the combination of digits that opens a lock. The trigger is learned, rather than innate. As I indicated above, it is something that makes us feel like a child in danger, one who cannot expect protection from a loving other, and one who must mount a solitary defense against increasing peril.

It is, of course, only when we feel unloved that the presence of a defect becomes a matter of concern. When narcissism allows us to employ the face-saving formulas of self-deception, or when other methods of avoidance permit us to remain functionally ignorant of our defects or to distract others from what might in different circumstances bring us shame, we can live in relative comfort within the larger world—even though we are still defective. But occasionally some accident of life will deny us the privilege of avoidance, or a ruthless foe may strip from us the layers of covering that provide solace. Then we are left both bare and unloved, suddenly endangered and in need of forceful protection.

Look again at our table of shame cognitions. In the situations we are discussing, the thoughts that cause the most pain are those of weakness, smallness, incompetence, clumsiness, and stupidity. If all else pales in significance alongside those issues, then any strategy that attenuates these painful thoughts will be acceptable, even if it risks the acceptance of ideas that belong to the other categories. In a burst of rage we prove our power, competence, and size, even though the previously intimate other may be forced to reel away from us. The alienating rage that repairs one form of shame is likely to leave us alone and unloved, shorn of personal companionship, highly visible, ugly, and cursed with a form of sexuality in which we experience no mutuality. In short, rage cures one part of shame while it magnifies most of the problems associated with the remainder of it.

Clearly, then, category A must contain scripts in which the noxious quality of shame is highly magnified—so much so that one is willing to suffer loss in other aspects of life in order to reduce this toxicity. The vicissitudes of life ensure that some portions of our self-image are more important than others.

Think, for a moment, about what might be going on inside the mind of a person who is being subjected to a humiliating encounter. A recent Stan Hunt cartoon from The New Yorker suggests this process: In the foreground we see two balding, middle-aged, well-dressed businessmen engaged in an incongruous fist fight; on the floor lie their cocktail glasses, their spectacles, and a table lamp. Around and behind them are the other guests, gowned and dressed for a posh party, all standing by in various attitudes of polite disbelief. The caption is spoken by one of the observers to another: “Well, they started exchanging wisecracks, then good-natured barbs, then openly hostile barbs, and then blows.” Why? As one taunt follows another, layer upon layer of self-esteem is ripped away until something shifts.

On the basis of the interactions I have studied, it seems to me that the decision to enter the realm of attack other scripts and to advance from one form of attack to another depends at least partially on our assessment of the interpersonal relationship involved. If the all-powerful king calls me a stupid idiot, a worthless clod devoid of intellect, an impotent sexless castrate, an ugly defective loser, and a traitor worthy only of exile, I may have no choice other than to defer to his judgment. (“Surely Your Serene Highness, although always accurate in his analysis, is having a bad day.”) My ability to sense and test the reality of my existence declares the uselessness of protest and the essential need for submission.

But should these insults be delivered by an authentic rival, I am likely to respond with more energy, especially when I cannot afford any shift in the balance of power between us. In order to attack that particular other I must have decided that his or her actions alter our relationship to such an extent that different rules now obtain. The shift produced by these actions may even remove someone from the category of those with whom I have an intimate tie. This person has proved not only to be dangerous, but to be no longer truly loyal, or worthy of my trust, or for me, or operating in my best interests, and therefore can and must be attacked. Often the purpose of the attack is to return this person to a more “normal” identity, both to him- or herself and relative to me.

In short, then, for someone to shift into the attack other mode of functioning the following conditions must be met: (1) The individual must feel endangered by the depths to which his or her self-esteem has been reduced; (2) this danger, regardless of the realm of the self in which it was initiated, must then be viewed as if it really derived from one of the items in category A, the body-ego; (3) the person must have grown up in a family system or some sort of environment that permits or encourages the use of attack to handle such forms of danger; and finally (4) the value and the importance of whatever interpersonal relationship had existed previously are critically reduced by the actions of the other.

RANGE OF REACTIONS

Think of all the mean things you have ever heard about all the ways people have hurt the feelings, body, career, public image, and relationships of others. Anything capable of bringing discomfort can be used to reduce one’s personal experience of shame by forcing it on someone else. The concept of discomfort can stretch from mischief and malaise to mayhem and murder. The choice of weapons and the degree of meanness involved are a measure of the perpetrator’s preexisting pain. Shame induced is directly proportional to shame feared and detested.

You may attack another person with an army, with a couple of hired thugs, with a gun, a baseball bat your bare fists or fingernails, a slap in the face, a communicable illness, a curse, an insult, a contemptuous sneer, a barely raised eyebrow, by refusing to acknowledge a friendly greeting, by cutting that person from your social circle, or by requiring of one’s friends that they, too, snub or shun your enemy. Each of these gestures can be experienced as an attack. It is the range and style of attack that concern us here.

Casual inspection reveals that any attribute, power, or ability may be used as a source, technique, or vehicle for attack. Neocortical cognition can allow us to conceive in the mind any number of plots against another person. The subcortical affect system can be used to treat that person with anger, disgust, or dissmell to produce distress, fear, or shame. We can kick, hit with fist or elbow, butt, or wrestle into submission the object of our anger; if our power over the other person is great enough we can show contempt by urinating on or smearing with feces whoever must be reduced to the status of an execrable thing.

The happiest use of the generative system involves the mutualization of arousal, excitement, and contentment in sexual activity; yet sex can be used as a weapon over a range from mild hostility to outright rape. The habit of cruelty to a dependent other is known as sadism. Rarely limited in practice to the sexual behavior described first in the novels of the Marquis de Sade, this form of attack is designed both to maintain connection with a chosen partner and to demonstrate the degree to which the perpetrator remains ascendent over the victim.

Do you wish to study the attack other form of reaction to shame? You have only to spend the evening watching television. On one show after another you will see people attacking each other in all of the ways described above. Words by which you might describe these attacks include, but are by no means limited to: Bully, blackmail, slander, put-down, ridicule, disdain, sarcasm, scorn, derision, mockery, satire, burlesque, haughtiness, criticism, censure, superciliousness, scoffing, sneering, slurs, vituperation, caustic, asperity, venom, virulence, viciousness, spite, petulance, cynicism, scathing, harsh, malevolent, malignant hateful, insulting, excoriating, abusive, corroding, surly, and contemptuous. Each of these terms describes a process by which some aspect of another person is reduced, abraded, diminished, abased, abashed, destroyed, hurt, dashed, daunted, dispirited, lessened, depreciated, belittled, disparaged, discredited, defamed, weakened, blunted, lessened, devalued, blemished, tarnished, injured, punished, or inconvenienced. The study of the attack other mode is an exercise through which we come to appreciate the extraordinary range of human creativity.

When the purpose of attack is to induce in the other the affects of shame, dissmell, and disgust, the methods used can be marvelously subtle or terribly broad. They can gratify the needs of the attacker by their delicacy or by their intensity. The factors that govern both style and intensity of attack are related to highly personal scripts operating far from the conscious mind of the subject.*

To live in the world and to interact with others always brings risk of shame, from the momentary twinge of embarrassment at the most minor of slips to the mortification that accompanies massive public failure. We ourselves will continue to experience shame in some degree as long as we draw breath; one of the tasks of living involves the need to handle our own personal shame over its immense and varied range of presentation. But of even more importance here is the fact that wherever we go in life we are forced to be in the presence of others whose response to their own private pangs of shame may well be in the attack other mode. Maturity and safety in the world at large demand that we learn some degree of restraint in our response to the taunts and slurs offered by those whose personal shame had nothing to do with us until we entered their orbit.

These are the moments when a telephone operator addresses our complaint by uttering a string of curses and cutting us off; when someone bumps into us in the street for no apparent reason; when a driver cuts you off or makes a sudden move that demonstrates the power and handling capability of his or her car but waves to you with upraised middle finger; when a clerk suddenly and unaccountably tells you to “go to hell” and simply stomps off. It is garbage dumped down the elevator shaft of an apartment house, graffiti on public buildings, cyanide placed in food or medicine to be purchased by the innocent, the incessant battle of the haves and the have-nots. It is about power used to erase the sting of weakness and disgrace—the “burn, baby, burn” of Watts rather than “build, baby, build.” It is the leavening influence of envy that seeks to find some null state of entropy in which we are all equally disadvantaged.

Sometimes it is easier to study the trivial than the extreme examples of a process. Here is a minor, everyday scene that I witnessed just the other day. Its very unimportance makes it ideal for our purposes, for the study of shaming interaction.

In a commercial district not far from my office, I observed two men arguing in a parking lot, their voices rising in volume but remaining below the level of shouting, the tone of their conversation ranging between truculent and sneering. The customer was upset that the attendant had refused to park his brand-new, shiny, expensive automobile in the most protected part of the lot and made known to the attendant his displeasure:

ATTENDANT: I don’t give a good fuck where you want to park that mother-fucking car. It goes where I fucking say it does.

CUSTOMER: What, is it too long for you?

ATTENDANT: You want to know what long is?

CUSTOMER: I know what long is. I got long. You wouldn’t know how to handle long. Park my fucking car by the fucking wall so nobody hits it! And if there’s one fucking scratch on that car I’m going to have your fucking ass.

ATTENDANT: That’d be the only ass you ever got except for the ass you put behind the wheel.

Other customers, both men and women, wait tolerantly for this conversation to end. Judging from their faces, you would say that they are studiously pleasant and perhaps occupied by internal concerns. In order to avoid being drawn into the argument, these unwilling spectators take care not to smile to the degree they are amused by the interchange or to exhibit disgust at the language used. All of us have heard conversations like this all our lives. Everybody knows that these men are using sexual language to argue over matters of power and dominance.

There are lots of reasons for someone to buy a new car, few of them automotive. New cars make us feel good about ourselves to the degree that they allow us to move up on the shame/pride axis. So the customer’s request for special treatment was at least partially a demand for recognition of his recently elevated, fragile sense of self. Involved here is the unspoken demand that we salute the success of the technique by which he has tried to avoid some moiety of personal shame. If our actions reduce the effectiveness of this avoidance script, he must shift to another quadrant of the compass of shame.

It is unlikely that someone who works in a parking lot can afford such a car. Poor people who work comfortably among the rich either accept social stratification or handle it by the mechanism of disavowal. The exchange described above represents one of those moments when this attendant’s protective mechanism broke down. For some reason, this particular demand by this particular customer on this particular afternoon made the attendant feel suddenly that the customer saw him as an inferior, throwing the attendant into an attack other script.

He reacted as we all do, by jumping to the layer of the shame/pride axis where he felt most comfortable, creating an argument at another level of comparison and competition. Although the attendant certainly would have lost face in an argument characterized by claims about financial net worth, he felt quite comfortable in the realm of sexual comparison. Furthermore, by introducing “dirty words” into a public forum where they will be heard by everybody, the attendant has removed one aspect of the social distance between him and his customer.

Immediately the conversation becomes clear. The attendant uses the word “fuck” three times in his opening statement, indicating the new battleground. The customer takes the bait and agrees to equate financial worth and genital size. Although the dispute remains one of power and dominance (which the attendant cannot win without placing his job at risk), he has been able to reduce the gap between himself and the customer. Neither of them can prove his allegations about sexual prowess or genital size; bragging statements exist within their own domain and are not meant to be taken literally. If the interchange is successful for both men, the driver will retain the sense of dominion bundled in with his automotive purchase and the attendant will feel he has held his own with someone who tried to humiliate him. Neither man was forced to resort to physical violence; both experienced the interchange as some combination of victory and defeat.

ALTERATIONS OF THE SELF

If an attitude of withdrawal makes one appear somewhat depressed; if attack self tends to support deference and masochism; and if avoidance tends to favor narcissism; then attack other halts any tendency to look within the self and thus fosters systems of externalization, blame, and paranoia. A great deal happens to us when we decide to enter the world of attack other.

One of the central themes underlying Sullivan’s interpersonal psychiatry was the idea that those who are born into a family capable of empathic connection tend to grow up with a feeling of power in interpersonal relationships. Empathy allows us to experience ourselves as having power with others. But to the extent that our parents do not seem to hear, see, appreciate, or understand us, said Sullivan, we grow up looking for ways to have power over others.

Like most of the great innovators in psychiatry prior to the development of affect theory, Sullivan did not distinguish among the many forms of shame we are now able to describe; neither did he have a scientific basis for the concept of empathy. Today we describe the unempathic parent somewhat more precisely as one who is not able to enter into affective resonance with a child. The lack of empathic connectedness and the consequent need for power can always be traced to failures in the communication of affect. My concept of the attack other system may be thought of as a refinement of his “power over” theme. I chose not to retain the older term simply because the thrust of this reactive system is more to reduce the other than to have authentic power that can be used for other purposes. Imagine, though, what it is like to go through life so destabilized by shame that you spend a significant part of your time looking for ways to diminish others. Whatever can produce such an effect becomes a potential weapon.

There are three affects that produce a state of inferiority, powerlessness, or estrangement from others: (1) We tend to become fearful when the intimate other is angry; the affect fear-terror can be a component of the shameful states of powerlessness, frailty, weakness, and impotence. (When we describe someone as attacking with a “cold, dissecting anger,” we know that the recipient has experienced shame as layer after layer of the protections expected in normal social life has been carved away by one who wished to bring pain to the other.) (2) Nearly all of us use some form of soap or deodorant to reduce the possibility that we will chase others away because we smell bad; when we produce the affect dissmell in others we are therefore shamefully reduced in status. (3) Anything we find disgusting must be kept at a distance; whoever triggers disgust in the other is therefore incapable of achieving intimacy or maintaining social position. So powerful are these affects in producing the sense of diminishment that they can become stable parts of the character structure of those who suffer from chronic shame and powerful weapons in the hands of those who wish to create shame in others.

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned the cinematic work of actor Clint Eastwood, celebrated for his portrayal of impassive but explosive eccentrics. It really isn’t correct to say that he is impassive, however, for always flickering over his face are the unmistakable displays of both disgust and dissmell. You can see this without effort in any of his classic rough-and-tough films; the attitude that characterizes him is one that defines the other person as dissmelling until proved otherwise or disgusting after making the wrong move. In moments of danger it is therefore easy for him to shift into an attack other mode because the enemy is viewed as unappetizing and somehow less than human. Even in one of his few romantic roles, that of “Partner” in the film version of Paint Your Wagon, this tendency to let his lips quiver in dissmell and disgust can be seen whenever the camera lingers on his face.

Eastwood is rarely angry in his films, which makes his explosions into violence all the more frightening. One might even translate his famous signature line to read. “I do not enjoy this no-man’s-land midway between shame and violence. If you will be kind enough to do anything that I might interpret as shaming, I can shift into the attack other mode, which I vastly prefer to shameful inaction.”

One way that anger, dissmell, and disgust come to be fused in some people is the display of emotion we call contempt, in which one corner of the lip is raised, the other lowered, and rest of the face held in angry tension. The general effect of contempt is to place the other person in a state of actual or potential shame and fear. Although this may be a perfect result for anyone in the attack other mode, it does require immense alterations in personal style for the sake of shame. The personality of the chronically contemptuous adult is limited to a narrow range of affective expression.

The bully uses the techniques of physical intimidation to maintain the other person in an inferior status. Bullying confers power, of course, but at the cost of tenderness and empathy. Coercion, the act of restraining or demanding compliance by the application of superior force, is another way of diminishing the self-respect of another person. Throughout the business community we find examples of people who use each elevation in rank as an excuse to treat increasing numbers of people as inferiors; similarly do we see power misused in the academic, religious, military, political, and artistic communities. Each of these subcultures legitimizes some characteristic form of the shame/pride axis; in each we find individuals who look on those below them as their immediate inferiors.

Wherever there is inequality of physical strength we are likely to see groupings of people based on the need of the weaker to be protected and the need of the stronger to feel important. Many marriages are based on the willingness of an abused wife to accept contempt, physical battering, and sexual slavery because she salutes or otherwise accepts the power and strength of her husband. Many people seem puzzled by sado-masochistic relationships, asking why anyone would enter such a system or accept the treatment it demands. Sadistic behavior requires masochistic surrender.

Yet the secret lies not in the picture we see when such relationships have reached the final form that explodes into our awareness, but in their early beginnings as the pairing of individuals with radically different but finely meshing attitudes toward shame. It is only a person with a characteristic stance of attack self who can form a stable link with one whose approach to life favors the scripts of attack other. And it is obvious that one who lives within the code of attack other would be lonely indeed were it not for the ubiquity of people who agree to accept a somewhat reduced status in order to prevent insecurity or abandonment. In none of Clint Eastwood’s films do we see him involved in a stable, intimate relationship; if he does end up with a female companion it is only because she becomes emotionally bound to him when his heroic behavior has saved her from death or the kind of sexual degradation and shame we call “a fate worse than death.”†

THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF ATTACK

There is perhaps no area of human endeavor as likely to be enlisted in the service of the defense against shame as sexuality. First in our daydreams, then in our rapt attention to the versions of attack self and attack other scripts provided by the entertainment industry, and finally in the experiments with others known as “dating,” we move from the absolute secrecy of inner life into interpersonal passion.

In the chapter on attack self I called attention to the work of psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller, whose lifetime of attention to sexuality has brought us a rich harvest of descriptive and theoretical contributions. As I mentioned there, anybody who has read his work understands the association between shame and sexual excitement. When sexually aroused, or when imagining scenes that contain sexual arousal, our thoughts hover about humiliations past and present, injustices experienced and feared, disgrace, failure, loss, ignominy, dishonor, put-downs, and ridicule endured—all recast in the language of sexuality.

In the attack self scripts we are likely to overcome these emotional traumas by some act of personal sacrifice. Stoller suggests that the romance novels favored by millions of women are a thinly veiled form of pornography in which, by softness and sexual availability, any woman can see herself turn a pirate king (or soldier of fortune or captain of industry or football hero) from the dangerous, tautly muscled, erect figure of a man he represents initially into a limp, harmless, relaxed, and unintimidating companion. Men, too, use this sort of script when they plan scenes of courtly deference as predecessor to seduction. As Stoller points out, an infinitude of variations on such themes enlivens the sexual fantasy life of our civilization. Where he is more likely to see humiliation as an obligatory part of sexual excitement, as intrinsic to the nature of sexuality, it will be clear to the reader that I understand the link between sex and shame as the result of a far more complicated process.

All our lives, the sexual drive programs of the generative system have been intruding into our consciousness, making us first feel the stirrings of sexuality and then try to make sense of these feelings by placing them into some kind of story. Sexual arousal, as we have discussed, operates at first from innate scripts that are controlled by subcortical centers and triggered according to internal timeclocks that respect no social code. The sexual drive makes us want each other, draws men and women together for the purpose of procreation. Yet the way we grow into our drives produces a predictable range of problems.

Sexual dimorphism is a fact of life; male and female humans experience the sexual drive differently. From birth to death, male arousal is inherently public simply because the penis is an external organ and engorgement moves it from quiescence to highly visible prominence. Female arousal is internal and inherently private. For a man to be sexual he must learn to convert the inherent embarrassment of arousal into social scripts through which he interacts with partners who accept his arousal. I do not believe there is anything intrinsically embarrassing about female sexual arousal, any real equivalent for women. Women may be embarrassed by the odor and sight of their menstrual flow (which are capable of triggering dissmell and disgust both in themselves and in others), but in the matter of arousal they experience shame only when taught to do so by social conditioning and, at that, quite late in development. Most women grow quite used to the early forms of sexual arousal long before they begin to menstruate.

This gender-based dimorphism directs the design and performance of scripts that influence all human society. Initially, boys and men learn to think privately about the problems caused them by sexual arousal, which become grouped with all the other sources of shame in their development. Soon enough, they talk among themselves about these particular mixed experiences of bodily pleasure and social discomfort. As I indicated earlier, I suspect that this difference in embarrassment scripts based on predictable and unavoidable drive-related experiences is a prime reason boys and girls segregate early into gender alliances. Even though other things are going on at the time, this is the period during which they must learn from each other how to handle arousal.

Look again at the compass of shame. When embarrassed, one may withdraw, become deferential; ignore, avoid, or distract from the issue; or make it a problem for someone else. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in our gender-differentiated attitude toward sexual arousal. Quite early on, boys learn that the normative male approach to drive-based sexual arousal is to blame it on women. Depending both on the degree of courage instilled in them by parental conditioning and peer sanction and on the attitude toward shame resulting from their individual experience as registered in Table 5, boys learn to approach girls. In our society, the normative masculine solution for the embarrassment caused by sexual arousal requires the formation of attack other scripts that come to be thoroughly intermingled and confused with the sexual drive itself. Indeed, it is this tendency to blame women for men’s arousal that makes it so much more likely that men will grow up with the attack other system and women within the scripts of attack self.

The early attempts at heterosexual interaction made by boys may be viewed as experiments in which they try to figure out what to do with these girl creatures who are now deemed to be the cause of their arousal. (“Boys,” said the 19-year-old daughter of a friend, “are okay until they reach adolescence and get testosterone poisoning.”) The wide range of masculine approaches to this problem creates, for women, one of the great puzzles of their lives. A significant part of what is considered normal female sexual development is actually the formulation of scripts devised to handle male sexual and counter-shaming approach. Later, of course, women do learn to control their sexual engines and do intentionally (as well as unintentionally) produce sexual arousal in men. But initially they are blamed for what is really a process going on within boys, who experience arousal whether or not there are women around. The very nature of gender dimorphism and its peculiar relation to shame forces women to develop their sexual identities in the context of masculine counter-shaming behavior.

If all this seems difficult and complex, imagine the problem faced by a boy who is heading for a homosexual orientation, whose sexual arousal is localized in the penis, just like that of his heterosexual companions, but who tends to blame these feelings on other male figures! Think, too, about the girl whose imagination persists in conjuring up scenes of romantic involvement with women every time she feels aroused. In both cases, some approach to conventional heterosexual behavior must be designed, and some compromise with embarrassment must be sought.

If we are lucky, we learn to accept the positive affects of interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy as they can so naturally become associated with sexual arousal. Sexuality can become intensely rewarding, both in the solitary experience of masturbation and in the interpersonal experience of intercourse or its equivalents. There are significant rewards to be derived from the integration of sexuality into interpersonal life. But in order to do this, one must learn to deal with shame. To complicate matters, just as sexual arousal is likely to attract shame, shame from other sources will become mingled into our attitude toward sexuality. It is rare, or perhaps unlikely, that anybody can enjoy sexuality as an island of normal function in a sea of shame.

As will easily be deduced from what has just been reviewed, sexual daydreams must, by their nature, include scenes in which humiliation is faced. Stoller suggests that the function of these flights of fancy is to allow us to dream up, in the theater of the mind, methods by which we can convert the defeats, rejections, slights, slurs, and failures of our past into the sexual successes of the future. Men and women alike, we are novelists and movie directors of wondrous ability, who design sturdy plots through which we satisfy needs created by the central issues of shame that come to haunt the lives of each of us.

Donald Mosher, working in concert with Tomkins, has made an extensive study of the group of scripts known as the macho personality or machismo. The macho man thinks of the negative affects distress, shame, and fear as uniquely feminine emotions synonymous with weakness. He develops a personal style that, by a process of education and experience, converts fear and distress into excitement and anger, and utilizes aggressive sexuality in order to prevent shame. In the macho script sexual success tends more toward rape than mutuality, for sexual arousal is allowed to work only in the service of attack other.

It is for this reason that the words used for sexual intercourse (“screwing” or “fucking”) have a positive connotation when used in the active sense (“I fucked him/her good,” or “I really screwed him”) and a negative connotation (“I’ve been fucked!”) when used in the passive. Notice that such a use of sexual action verbs conveys no suggestion of pleasure or contentment except as it produces shame in the recipient. Machismo has become a behavioral standard for a huge segment of our population, which is moving rapidly from a cultural psychology of courtly deference to one of contemptuous attack.

The foregoing is by no means intended to represent a thorough survey of the attack other mode of defense against shame. Rather, it is my intent to suggest that the principles involved here may apply to a wide variety of human actions not heretofore thought involved with shame. The compass of shame suggests the extraordinary range and complexity of our methods for the detoxification of the intrinsically painful affect Tomkins calls shame–humiliation. The concept should lend itself to further elaboration in a number of areas.

One final observation before we move on to the next section. It is interesting to note that, as I have commented on many occasions, Wurmser sees shame as a layered emotion (1981, p. 27–28). The six categories of shame-related thoughts that he is able to bring into consciousness with the use of psychoanalytic technique (see p. 144) are quite similar to what I have called the cognitive phase of shame (Table 5). He is able to detect most or all of these layers in the analysis of any shame situation.

Yet when we are in the middle of a shame experience we are unlikely to be aware of such thoughts—what we do recall is some combination of triggering source and an action that fits within the compass of shame. In contrast to Basch’s definition of emotion as the combination of an affect and our association to previous experiences of that affect, I have added the dimension of scripted reaction. Once a script is brought into the picture, discrete memories in response to a triggered affect are both unnecessary and unavailable. Only through analytic enquiry can the microcircuitry of a script be evaluated; only then do we begin to learn why certain reaction patterns are likely to occur in certain contexts.

Let us move on in a lighter vein. Our dour and often heartless attitude toward sexuality is not mirrored in other cultures. The Eskimo culture (a happy one until destroyed by our introduction of alcohol) calls sexual intercourse by the same word they use for laughter. It is possible for adults to be both playful and safe with each other. Yet in order to do this they must develop an attitude toward shame quite different from those sketched in the preceding chapters. It is to the phenomenology of acceptance and openness that I wish now to turn, the ways and means through which we learn to laugh at ourselves and thus to accept the lessons to be taught by shame.

*I have discussed these “shaming systems in couples, families, and institutions” in an earlier contribution (1987b).

†Melvin R. Lansky (1987) has advanced our understanding of what Piers and Singer (1953) referred to as shame/guilt cycles and Helen Block Lewis (1971) called humiliated fury. Lansky brought entire families into a hospital unit in order to observe the relation between shame and violence.