One spring day, not so many years ago, I ventured forth from the safety and sanctuary of my office and my study to share with some colleagues my growing conviction that we were all pretty much ignorant about the nature of shame. I said that we might help our patients better if we remedied this situation. A lifetime of painful shyness had made it difficult for me to speak in public, even though I had by that time spent more than 20 years studying the biology and the phenomenology of emotion. This was my first professional presentation in psychiatry.
I knew that shame was considered the ignored emotion, “the Cinderella of the unpleasant emotions,” according to Rycroft’s Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. It didn’t seem possible to me that any one paper would change this, so I had organized an entire symposium on shame to take place under the umbrella of the American Psychiatric Association. Co-sponsored by the American Psychoanalytic Association, it turned out to be the first meeting in the history of psychiatry or psychoanalysis, either here in America or over in Europe where psychoanalysis got its start, to focus on the nature of shame.
Afterwards, a friend took me aside and said, “That was really nice. But don’t do anything more on shame. You wouldn’t want to get a reputation for that.” A kind and thoughtful man, he was truly concerned about my public image. Better to hide new ideas in obscurity than risk exposure and humiliation, especially ideas about an unpopular subject.
It was in that moment that I learned that the very idea of shame is embarrassing to most people.
So much discomfort does shame produce that people will go to great lengths to avoid it. Many of us who have studied shame in depth believe that it is a primary force in social and political evolution. Shame—our reaction to it and our avoidance of it—becomes the emotion of politics and conformity. It guides and creates fashion; its influence in human civilization is paramount.
In the opening scene of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, John Tanner tells us that “we live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” For one interested in shame the problem is not that it is difficult to find examples worth study. Rather, the more significant puzzle is how it has managed to elude us until now. This most common of unpleasant experiences is also the least discussed.
Who among us has not at some time been paralyzed by shame? As a boy, poring over the Reader’s Digest anecdotes called “My Most Embarrassing Moment,” I wondered whether I could ever tell anybody about those moments when I had goofed, or made a fool of myself, or said precisely the wrong thing to someone I wanted to impress. Since we all tend to place ourselves in the position of the person telling a story, were I to tell you any of them right now I am afraid you might shudder with discomfort and stop reading. I have never mastered the clown’s art of turning my own misfortune into comedy.
Perhaps laughter is the best defense against the pain of shame. The clown makes a trade. Dressed in his traditional costume (the classical clown is always male), he behaves with all the foolishness of a small child pretending to be an adult. Although people are laughing at him (which is embarrassing) the laughter is under his own control, which makes him feel powerful and proud of himself rather than helpless and ashamed.
Most of us work hard to present ourselves to the world as competent and “cool.” Any time people laugh at us our self-esteem is reduced and we are embarrassed. Any moment of embarrassment is guaranteed to interrupt the flow of our day and reduce our ability to live comfortably among others, let alone feel comfortable within ourselves. The clown gives up this very important piece of self-esteem in order to gain whatever sense of personal pride comes from his success in getting us to laugh at his command.
Most clowns, and certainly all comedians, are quick to admit that they are basically shy people, terribly afraid of being laughed at. One comic told me privately, “The only time in my life I really feel comfortable with myself is when I’m on stage working and the audience is laughing. Going out socially is a trap because I’m too shy to talk to people as myself, and if I start to tell jokes or do my routine I’m working and not going out to relax like ordinary people. So I tend to stay home a lot.”
The circus clown strikes a good deal. It is only his garish costume and heavy makeup that identify him as the object of our laughter. Dressed in civilian clothes, he merges quietly, imperceptibly, into the crowd, his power and his frailties held privately within him. Throughout this book we will see everywhere how we adults balance our private selves and our public presentation, and how intricately these are tied up with what for each of us becomes our personal definitions of shame and pride.
The easiest way to start the study of shame is to observe the fine points of this linkage between embarrassment and laughter. All the equipment you need is in your own living room. Make a videotape of your favorite situation comedy and, after you’ve enjoyed it once or twice, watch it again to see why you laughed. Pick, if possible, a show without a fake audience, one that does not resort to a phony laugh track to force us into synchrony or conformity by telling us when to laugh. The conventional wisdom of the television industry dictates that a successful show must have a certain number of laughs per minute, whether or not something “funny” is happening. What we are after here are the moments in which you laugh.
Notice how often what you found amusing involved somebody’s embarrassment. Examples may range from pratfalls or clear, obvious flashes of unexpected stupidity to subtle comments or allusions that made you think of something stupid you yourself had once done but that you didn’t know anyone else had ever experienced.
Next, try to figure out why there was embarrassment associated with the action within the show. Pretty soon you will see that shame seems always to involve a more-or-less sudden decrease in self-esteem, a moment in which we are revealed as somewhat less than we want to believe. On a sitcom most people are friendly to each other, so whoever has been exposed is in an atmosphere of interpersonal safety. When our frailties or foibles are exposed before those in whose presence we do not feel safe or loved, this mild, humorous embarrassment gives way to the deeper forms of shame like humiliation or mortification. Comedy, however, rarely does more than hint at the darker side of shame; perhaps some of its success lies in the delicacy with which it plays around the edges of what is hidden within each of us. We all live on some line between shame and pride. The work of comedy is to make this border a bit safer.
The comedian stands alongside us, pointing at others, exposing the falseness of their self-esteem and so allowing us the safety of laughing at them, while the clown focuses our attention on himself and asks us to laugh at him. The only remaining performers who make us laugh are the jesters, who (to the extent they are given permission) can expose our secrets and make us laugh at ourselves. They live at the greatest risk, for the slightest slip will move them past the boundary of “good taste” into a realm where they incur only wrath. In the medieval court the jester alone could tell the truth about the king. Usually a deformed and therefore already “defective” and shameworthy creature, his humor came from this ability to expose and embarrass within strictly defined limits. There are a lot of jokes about jesters sentenced to death for “going too far.”
There is, of course, much more to comedy than its relation to shame. Bill Cosby, who is gifted as clown, comedian, and jester, brings an additional talent I haven’t seen since Jimmy Durante, whose contagious happiness made audiences laugh because they just plain felt good. (All of the affects are capable of “infecting” others.) With the sound turned off, watch an early videotape of Cosby and you will often see him shaking with silent mirth, the most potent form of infectious laughter. When he does that, we observers tend to laugh, even though we aren’t laughing “about” anything. Robert Culp, who starred with Cosby in their 1960s detective sitcom “I Spy,” said that there were many times they had to do a number of “takes” of a scene because both he and the other members of the cast were laughing unaccountably when Cosby was involved.
If you take the trouble to study videotapes of television shows from previous decades, I think you will see that Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Jackie Gleason are great clowns; stand-up comics like Bob Hope and Johnny Carson fit my definition of comedians (even though they often clown); while the tradition of the jester is upheld by Buddy Hackett (who can poke fun at anybody safely) and Don Rickles, whose insults are so focused and piercing that the object of his attack must ever be on the edge of fighting back—shame experienced as an uncertain balance between laughter and rage. Watching Rickles insult others on a television show has become a form of spectator sport. Merely to attend his nightclub act places one at risk of assault by jest.
The work of these masters of comedy has stood the test of time because it touches on themes of shame and pride important to major segments of the population. Comics come and go, each with an idea or a gimmick that may or may not attract a secure following. Steve Martin worked as a clown who allowed us to laugh at his exaggerated narcissism; when this maneuver wore thin he became a screen actor. Bobcat Goldthwaite is a clown in the realm of fear. When he screams we see an adult exposed as a little boy forced to live in the terrifying world of grownups. The talented young Rita Rudner uses her considerable intelligence to appear naive and a bit stupid, her grace and poise operating in stark (and often hilarious) contrast to the embarrassed incoordination we would expect in one who is aware of what she is saying. Check out the current crop of entertainers (while they are available) to see how each of them uses shame.
In societies that do not foster the work of the jester we see the emergence of satire, which exposes to bitter laughter what has been hidden. Shame can power all forms of humor. Of course I know that there is more to humor than shame, and more to happiness than liberation from shame. Nevertheless, few experiences in life are so pleasant as the moment of release from shame or the realization that our foibles are accepted with love.
A FEW TERMS DEFINED
People use a wide range of words to describe their personal experience of shame. Any simple definition will be influenced by an individual’s life experience, including the family, neighborhood, nation, or era in which one grew up. I suggest that we follow the lead of the psychoanalyst Léon Wurmser, who speaks of the shame experience as a family of emotions. These are uncomfortable feelings, ranging from the mildest twinge of embarrassment to the searing pain of mortification, the Latin roots of which imply that shame can strike one dead. Shame often follows a moment of exposure; what has been exposed is something that we would have preferred kept hidden, usually something of an intimate and personal nature. Although it can be handled or diminished by laughter, anger, or withdrawal, shame always speaks about our inner self rather than our actions.
Often shame is confused with guilt, a related but quite different discomfort. Whereas shame is about the quality of our person or self, guilt is the painful emotion triggered when we become aware that we have acted in a way to bring harm to another person or to violate some important code. Guilt is about action and laws. Whenever we feel guilty, we can pay for the damage inflicted. The confessional is a system of release from guilt, for it allows us to do penance for sins we know we have committed—a simple trade of one action for another.
Sometimes we are accused of wrongdoing and brought to public trial. The legal proceedings themselves are a source of shame, even though by them we are adjudged “guilty” or “not guilty.” If guilty, we are punished within the system of laws that governs us. No such easy system exists to facilitate our return from shame.
Whether our good works have been occasioned by priestly instruction or by personal choice, when we do something well we usually feel good about ourselves. Just as we will use the word shame to indicate the family of negative emotions associated with incompetence, failure, or inadequacy, “pride” will define a whole family of positive emotions. The basic feeling of pride stems from the pleasure we achieve in a moment of competence.
All too often our self-esteem has been reduced by a myriad of circumstances far out of our control, and the only way we can get a quick pick-me-up is to do something that makes us feel good. Throughout this book I will talk about the balance between shame and pride, between the sort of hoped-for personal best that hovers as an unreachable image within most of us and the terribly feared personal worst that, when revealed, will trigger an avalanche of deadly shame. This shame/pride axis will occupy much of our attention, for it is against this yardstick that we evaluate all of our actions, and along which is strung our fragile and precarious sense of self.
Such concepts are easy to understand when we study people who are more or less like us—who take pride in accomplishments we favor, are guilty about actions we consider wrong, and are embarrassed at the disclosure of personal qualities we do not fancy. Yet at the level of the emotion itself, can there be any real difference between the pride of a hunter bagging his quarry, the pride of a soldier who kills his enemy in battle, and the pride experienced by a terrorist when his bomb kills a busload of schoolchildren? I think not. In each situation the same emotion has been triggered by a different source.
Consider, too, the fact that the driver of a bank robber’s getaway car may feel guilty when a maneuver executed to avoid killing an innocent passerby results in the arrest of a partner. Can we also suspend our own sense of morality enough to understand the possibility that a Nazi officer working in a death camp might feel humiliated when his superiors saw that he was unable to kill his quota of Jews that day? Our adult experiences of shame and pride are linked inextricably to the culture in which we live, the interpersonal milieu within which our personalities are formed. We must be careful to avoid the trap of saying that our understanding of any emotion is better or more valid than that of one who grew up differently.
Some years ago I read in Newsweek that scholars had translated a medieval literary work loaded with meticulous descriptions of the personal habits of rather commonplace people. Neither the quality of observation nor the importance of the subjects seemed to have warranted publication of the original book. After much study it was determined that this was a book of humor, little or none of which was funny today. Comedy involves exposure that triggers embarrassment capable of being handled as amusement. Those personal attributes we wish to keep hidden serve as the resource, the reservoir for shame.
Remember when we read in school the comedies of Shakespeare and dutifully studied the dour scholarly footnotes telling us what was probably funny around 1600? Whatever is contained in the reservoir changes from one era to another; thus the reasons for embarrassed laughter vary over time. But no matter what type of embarrassment forms the basis of humor, it is discussed and presented and experienced as humor, rather than anything primarily related to shame. Shame is the hidden power behind much of what occupies us in everyday life.
One might think that shame, this most deeply personal of emotional experiences, would be a common subject in the world of psychotherapy. It is, after all, in our personal therapy that most of us learn to overcome the shame associated with the revelation of our most cherished and painful secrets. The general reader may be surprised to learn that until quite recently shame has been almost totally ignored by the various schools of psychotherapy.
Whenever a patient tried to talk about an embarrassing experience, the therapist was likely to nod sympathetically or laugh tolerantly to indicate that the embarrassment was probably deserved. A deeper experience of shame was handled by addressing the anger or fear that accompanied it or by confusing it with guilt. Highly competent therapists had been trained neither to treat nor even to recognize shame, but were immediately attentive to those other emotions, which they understood quite well. Certainly the world of psychotherapy has acknowledged the existence of shame, but as a “primitive” emotion worthy of less serious attention than guilt.
A CLUE: SHAME AND DEPRESSION
It happens that both shame and guilt are important symptoms of the group of illnesses now called “depression.” When someone is filled with guilt unrelieved by confession and penance, by recollection and interpretation, or by the intentional restructuring of thought patterns, a modern psychiatrist offers antidepressant prescriptions. Such symptoms are typical of a biological depression and often easily relieved by proper medication.
But it also happens that some people seem depressed but complain more that there is something wrong that makes them shy away from and fear contact with others or that makes them seek hedonistic experiences which offer transient relief. Interestingly enough, this sort of discomfort has always been difficult to treat by any means, and it has come to be known as “atypical depression.” More recently, it has been shown that these patients respond to a group of medications entirely different from that which works with classical depression. Like my colleagues, I am pleased that we are now able to help a greater number of patients. Nevertheless, it seems to me incorrect to ignore a basic emotion.
In 1984 I suggested that classical depression involved the thinking, the feeling, and the chemistry of guilt, and that the atypical depressions were about shame. Many of my associates were startled by the idea that there was a chemistry for any individual emotion and astonished at the idea that shame and guilt might have different biological origins. Suddenly, the very fact that we had a “treatment” for persistent and unremitting shame made it worthwhile for many people to contemplate shame, a subject about which they had almost no information.
THE STUDY OF SHAME
Paradoxically, many fine, well-written books and journal articles about shame had been available for years, although none had ever found its way into the mainstream of psychotherapeutic education. I know of no textbook in general psychology or psychiatry that allots more than a few sentences to shame. Many fail to mention it at all.
It is axiomatic that therapists treat their own patients in a manner and style somewhat akin to the way they themselves were treated. In part, we therapists base our personal style—the way we “do therapy”—on what we learned from our teachers and from our reading. The overwhelming majority of psychotherapists has had some experience of personal therapy, for it really is very difficult for anyone to understand the deeper layers of another’s personality unless one has had some experience dealing with one’s own. This period of personal therapy is so important to a growing therapist that, for better or worse, it is stamped indelibly onto that therapist as a major piece of his or her personal style. And therapists who have never been trained or treated in the area of shame can neither recognize nor treat the shame of another.
In an attempt to change this situation, as I mentioned above, I organized the symposium “Shame—New Clinical and Theoretical Aspects” for the May 1984 national meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Four of the papers presented there became the core of a book called The Many Faces of Shame, in which I attempted to bring together and call attention to the work of every living scholar known for either theoretical or clinical work in this area. The enormous interest generated by that meeting has produced a flood of books and articles on shame, making it today more trendy than ignored.
Such shifts in both the public and private perceptions of an emotion have been a central interest of mine for many decades. From early childhood I have asked three questions: What is emotion? Why does the human have so much of it? and What can be done about it? It is neither desirable nor even possible to write sensibly about any emotion without addressing these three questions. Any attempt to study shame and pride will be flawed and misleading unless these emotions are placed in the context of a general theory of emotion. This is more true for shame than for any other emotion. As I will demonstrate in a later chapter, the reasons it has been hidden and ignored are both intrinsic to its biologic nature and implicit in the general theories of emotion prevalent until recently.
Many of us treat emotion merely as something that interferes with thinking. We demean arguments by calling them emotional, discredit people who seem emotionally involved in whatever bothers them, trust feelings less than cognition. Our culture even has code words that allow us to pretend we are talking about thinking rather than feeling. Rather than admit that our concern is emotional, we will say, “I have a problem with that,” or “Don’t bother me with such ideas,” or “That upsets me.”
Whenever we place somebody on the inherently pejorative axis of rational versus irrational we have implied a judgment about the degree to which reason has been impaired by emotion. Our concept of maturity is related to the observation that children are more likely to be overwhelmed by emotion than adults. An adult does not merely cry when distressed—one is reduced to tears. (Even to express certain emotions is shameful.) The champion of my high school debating team won a great victory arguing that any decision made with passion was intrinsically flawed, an attitude equally prevalent these forty years later.
Some complex emotions, like love and loyalty, are valued when kept within limits; others, like cold hatred and murderous rage, are generally viewed as inhuman or beyond the range of acceptability. But despite our attitudes toward one or another emotion, we rarely think about emotion as such or try to place a particular emotion within a coherent scheme for all emotion. Pretty much, we take for granted that emotion exists, for better or worse, and that we have to live with it.
Even more perplexing is the fact that every one of us has a personal system of definitions for each emotion. Somewhere in the initial series of interviews through which a prospective new patient and I evaluate each other, I have always asked this stranger certain questions about his or her experience of anger. I want to know how each parent behaved when angry, what anger feels like to my patient, and how he or she behaves when angry. One man may shout, yell, and pound his fist on the table; another throw small objects around the room; another may treat people with similar violence; still others may curl the lip in contempt and sneer at the object of their anger; while another group of adults may grow cold, withdraw, and become silent until the storm of emotion has passed. And if I ask the man who shouts what he thinks of anger expressed by icy withdrawal, he may tell me that such behavior is not anger but “meanness,” which (to him) is an entirely different emotion.
Until recently there has been neither language nor science capable of explaining everything we do and do not know about emotion. Just as each of us has arrived at our current age and station in life by treading a path of experiences on the soil of time, so have the various schools of medicine, psychology, and philosophy traveled through time accumulating language and tradition.
The general thrust of medical research has been to study and treat the human body. In their search for causes and cures, physicians have asked questions about the physiological and biochemical systems of the body. The medically trained practitioner is likely to think about emotion in terms of biology.
Although the field of psychology is broad and its interests varied, for many years academic psychology favored scientific experimentation in the areas of perception, cognition, memory, and learning. Until quite recently, in neither medicine nor psychology had the study of emotion as such been of great interest. And, although there have been many philosophers who discussed specific emotions in detail and considered the idea of emotion itself as a worthy discourse, none of their work fits well with that of scholars in the other fields.
For the greatest part of this century psychoanalysis has been the dominant philosophical/psychological system attempting to explain all human mental and emotional processes. Freud began as a medical scientist, the early papers documenting his study of nerve tissue with dissecting knife and microscope and of the effects on neural mechanisms of such complex chemicals as cocaine. As a practicing neurologist, it was natural for him to study patients with hysterical paralysis. A century ago it was quite difficult to determine whether a limp and useless limb had been weakened by injury to the nerves leading to its muscles or was evidence of an affliction of the mind. Among the great contributions in this formative period of his work was the development of a method of analysis that allowed new understanding of the latter such cases. It turned out that these patients had learned to handle intense emotion by focusing attention on some part of the body little related to the source of that emotion. Thus, psychoanalysis was initially a method of studying the effects of emotion on cognition and bodily function.
There was a red thread woven through all the cases Freud studied. In each patient the dangerously intense emotions that led to the illness had been associated with thoughts and feelings about sex; consequently, the founder of psychoanalysis turned his attention to the nature of sexuality.
No matter how great the mental equipment of a scientist, he or she is still a product of an era. Freud grew up in that explosive period of scientific thinking during which the greatest minds were searching for basic forces, for unitary solutions to complex problems. This was the time when Einstein was looking for a unified field theory that would explain all matter and energy in terms of their relation to some basic substance or force. Sir William Osler, the reigning medical genius, was only seven years older than Freud. He changed medicine by teaching physicians a new method of diagnosis in which one tried to attribute all the symptoms of the patient to one illness. Before Osler a patient might be diagnosed and treated for many illnesses at the same time; after Osler the clinician would search for the single disease that could produce all the symptoms observed. It was an epoch that fostered the condensation of forces.
There is no question that Freud was one of the great thinkers of all time. Many of his contributions hold up even today, when our science is advanced enough to provide the technology needed to test his theories. Nevertheless, most of those who study emotion have discarded his basic idea that all human mental and emotional functions are powered by the sexual force he called libido. Too much work has been done in too many other areas of science for this brilliant synthesis to remain acceptable.
Of course I believe that there is a sexual drive and that it has a powerful influence on human development. But it is neither the basic motivating force for which Freud searched nor the source of emotion itself. As a matter of fact, the new work on emotion (around which this book is woven) allows us to present an entirely new theory for the nature of human sexuality, as well as the relation between sex and shame.
Such statements are taken for granted when I lecture in settings that favor the study of physiology or other medical sciences. It has been said that 95 percent of what is known about the human brain was learned in the past decade. Pouring in daily as research reports from the great laboratories of medicine and neurobiology, often popularized by newspaper accounts of this research offered to the public as filtered through the bias of reporters with deeply personal prejudices, are data undreamed of at the other end of this century.
Often I am asked to speak before psychoanalytic groups, who are of course deeply interested in anything concerning the nature of emotion. But time and time again I will be thanked for my efforts and told “What you say is very interesting, but it is too soon. We do not yet know enough about the brain. For the moment we will stick with the ideas given us by Freud.” Then someone will ask me to reread one of his papers from 1924, as if to say that had I really understood his work I would not have needed to ask the questions that always hover around me.
When, however, I discuss these ideas about shame and the entire spectrum of emotion before audiences whose training has led them to evaluate patients in terms of their need for medication, I am told with equal vigor, “We are tired of all this psychoanalytic language. You are nothing but a psychoanalyst with a laboratory coat. You want us to ignore biology and think about things for which we cannot test.”
Needed most is some method of integration, some system of thought that pulls into one coherent system all known data on the nature of human emotion. In the chapters that follow I will try to explain one such logical approach, showing how it has developed and giving credit to the scientists responsible. Rather than overload the reader who neither has nor wants a technical education, this material will be presented in language accessible to all, while the bibliography will allow one to check my sources either for further edification or for later dispute.
HARDWARE, FIRMWARE, AND SOFTWARE
One central theme underlies every aspect of this book. I ask you to look at the total picture of human emotion influenced by your experience of the contemporary desktop electronic computer. Imagine for a moment that you have just switched on all the components of your personal computer. Immediately it begins to whir and buzz, while across the viewscreen flicker a number of messages. Soon, however, the device comes to rest and lets you know that it is prepared to operate as a writing device or a spreadsheet or a dictionary or a printing machine.
You are, of course, well aware that the electrical contraptions involved are known to us as hardware and that these machines know how to assist our work with numbers or words because they have been programmed to do so by software instructions. Frankly, all the digital computer really does is handle various assortments of the numbers “1” and “0.” It is the software that makes a computer useful, that manipulates the handling of those two numbers in such a way that we seem to be writing or doing mathematical tasks.
Yet no computer can work without the interposition of yet another technical wonder. As the machine was warming up, you may have noticed on its screen some indication that it was manufactured by one or another company. It “knew” to do this neither because of any software program nor because of anything intrinsic to the hardware itself, but by virtue of a specific form of prewritten instructions locked in tiny devices called “chips.” We call this form of instruction firmware; it is neither “soft” nor “hard.” Computer firmware was once written by some remarkably intelligent human, but now has become “part of the machine.”
Humans, too, have hardware, firmware, and software. All the parts we call “the body”—bones, joints, hair, skin, blood and all the chemicals transported by it, central nervous system—may be thought of as our hardware. How we grow up, how we are influenced by parents, peers, school, government, advertising—all this may be considered analogous to software. But the way the fetus grows within the uterus and develops from a one-celled organism to a squalling baby, the way baby grows into full biological maturity, how the menstrual cycle knows its monthly responsibilities—all that is directed by firmware programs written permanently into the biological structure called the human genetic code.
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Table 1 |
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COMPUTER MODEL |
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FOR THE HUMAN EMOTIONAL SYSTEM |
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HARDWARE |
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Central nervous system, including biochemical environment, neurotransmitters, structural “wiring,” data handling capacity, information storage and retrieval. |
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Striated muscles controlling face, posture, vocalization. |
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Endocrine and exocrine systems. |
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FIRMWARE |
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Affects Drives |
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SOFTWARE |
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Learning Social conditioning Experience |
One name will recur throughout this book, that of the late psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins. Right at the midpoint of this century he recognized in a flash the nature of the firmware programs responsible for normal emotion. He called this group of mechanisms the affect system, and described it in a series of books called Affect/Imagery/Consciousness. For reasons peculiar only to him, the first two volumes appeared in 1961 and 1962, and the third in 1991. The final volume will probably emerge contemporaneous with my own.
Tomkins is the American Einstein, that sort of genius whose work was so far ahead of its time that it simply could not be understood when it first appeared. Slowly, quietly, affect theory has come to influence thinkers all over the world, many of whom do not even know where and how it originated. Others, truly unaware of Tomkins’s work, have unwittingly duplicated parts of it and thought their work original. Affect/Imagery/Consciousness is written in a dense prose style requiring far deeper study and an attention span far longer than that usually required by even the most difficult theoretical work.
Many scholars have taken advantage of the relative inaccessibility of this unique and demanding theoretical system, cribbing from it one chunk at a time and passing off as their own what they have stolen from Tomkins. On occasion, corrupt editors, journalists, colleagues, and competitors have actually conspired to erase his name from textbooks and journals. An astonishingly tiny fraction of the current crop of honest, well-trained psychologists and psychiatrists is aware of Tomkins and his life work. Here is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science, some of which will become apparent from these pages, but much of it yet to be told by others.
I am interested in the hardware, firmware, and software of emotion. I want you to share my fascination with the idea that we can be frightened when accosted by a thief in the night, by an otherwise inaccessible memory hidden within the unconscious, by an inborn error in metabolism that produces “fear chemicals,” and by any number of medications taken into the body for other purposes. In each case, we experience fear that differs only in respect to its source; only one firmware program, one affect, is necessary to produce each type of fear. Each of the affects can be triggered by hardware, firmware, or software. Shame can occur when our secrets are exposed, when an aberration of biology produces an atypical depression, or when we ingest certain chemicals.
To my knowledge, all previous books about the nature of any specific emotion—or about emotion itself—have ignored this simple observation. This is a book about the many and varied interactions made possible by the extraordinary flexibility of our biochemical hardware system, the remarkable group of firmware systems we call the drives and the affects, and the intricate medley of experiences that is the software of human life. We begin the book talking about emotion; soon we will give up that overly inclusive term in favor of the more precise language made possible by affect theory.
A gripe: Most theories work not because of the information, the data they describe, but because of what they ignore. I have spent my life studying emotion. We simply dare no longer to maintain psychoanalytic or cognitive theories about emotion that ignore what we know about brain function and neurotransmitters or to insist on biological theories that ignore the vast body of psychoanalytic experience. Incorporated here is all the information needed to bridge the widening schism separating what have been caricatured as “mindless” biology, “brainless” psychoanalysis, “unfeeling” cognitive theory, and social psychology that ignores the internal. To the best of my knowledge, the theories introduced here ignore or are incompatible with no realm of current knowledge.
A challenge: Theory is meant to be revised in favor of new information. If this synthesis of old and new ideas is successful, it will provoke research that confirms or disconfirms these new arguments for the nature of emotion. Should information emerge that demands alteration in the system introduced herein, I will openly and gladly add it to future editions.
THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK
Here, then, is a map of the book. It is divided into five sections, the argument of each dependent on what has been discussed in the preceding one.
New theory demands new language. In the first section I will describe the biology of emotion so that the reader will be able to understand in this context the groups of emotions called shame and pride, as well as all the illnesses in which they figure. But there is far more involved here than biology. In each adult experience of shame and pride these biological mechanisms are called into play somewhat differently, producing what we may call the psychology of shame. Although the action of these firmware affect mechanisms can be demonstrated in the newborn infant, it is clear that the adult experience of emotion is greatly influenced by the way our personality has developed over time. I will try to explain how the brain of the newborn becomes the mind of the adult and the role in this development played by shame and pride.
The next section takes up the theme with which I began this introductory chapter—the scope of the shame experience. We will look at shame and pride in all their aspects, surveying both their public and private appearances. In order to understand the wide range of shame emotions and the broad array of painful thoughts accompanying any moment of embarrassment we will study each and every realm of human function in which the firmware for shame can be involved. Furthermore, any experience of shame calls forth the sense of a defective self. We will show how the concept of self evolves and how shame comes to be associated with it.
In the third section we discuss love and sex. Shame produces a terrible sense of alienation, a sense of being shorn from the herd. The more one knows about the affect system, the easier it is to understand the nature of attachment. Love and hate are the most profound forms of attachment; redefined in terms of affect theory, their relation to shame will be elucidated.
One of the best-known group of firmware programs, perhaps the cluster most visibly associated with shame, involves what has come to be known as sexuality. Most of us have taken for granted that the work of Freud, focusing as it did on the relation between sexuality and the development of the personality, answered nearly all the questions one might ask about the psychology of sex. Much to my surprise, the more I began to investigate shame in the manner described above, the more it appeared necessary to offer a new theory for the sexual drive. I had no intention of entering that particular thicket of psychological theory; once you approach the subject of shame in an orderly fashion many things must change. From this new work we begin to understand why so much embarrassment hovers around gender identity and sexual experience.
Both the length of this book and the wide range of subjects covered can be blamed on the genius of Tomkins rather than the tenacity of the author. One who comes to understand affect theory feels something like a scientist handed a totally new instrument—like the early microscopists, or Galileo suddenly empowered to look deeper into the night sky.
All possible sources of shame are brought to mind any time shame affect is triggered. What happens next, presented in the fourth section, is much more complicated. Each time something triggers an episode of shame we tend to act in a very predictable fashion. There are four basic patterns of behavior that govern our reactions to this complex emotion; these I have grouped as “the compass of shame.” It is the four poles of the compass that house all the scripts we know as shameful withdrawal, masochistic submission, narcissistic avoidance of shame, and the rage of wounded pride. For each of us, this group of reaction patterns has a great deal to do with the nature of our personality. Character formation, the essence of self-definition, is immutably linked to shame.
Anything that can cause pain may be used to hurt people, so we must study shame as some have used it in a weapon system. We take for granted that wars have been excused on the basis of national honor; yet this is but another way of saying that our species will fight to avoid the sting of shame.
Where there is a natural source of pain one might expect a natural form of solace. Throughout history, comedy has offered its own balm; from the work of the comedic masters we can learn much about shame. We will examine in detail the work of Buddy Hackett, a great comedian whose art not only informs us about shame but offers its own style of solace. The more you know about shame, the less trivial seems comedy.
I am concerned not just with the range of affect experienced during normal existence but also with that experienced at levels of intensity far beyond anything for which the human has evolved. What is a rampage? What is a killing frenzy? How are these states related to shame? Of those who can avoid the experience of shame neither in their relationships with others nor in the privacy of their innermost selves, many turn to drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess. In the final section we will also study the ease with which such activities bind up unbearable amounts of shame, as well as the ease with which shame itself can freeze or bind an entire personality.
It may come as a surprise to many that, although the basic biological mechanisms involved seem to have existed relatively unchanged for thousands of years, there is good evidence to suggest that the conscious adult experience of affect has undergone many shifts. We will learn something about shame and pride throughout Western history and see how much these two emotions have themselves been responsible for major changes in culture and society. Were I only to demonstrate the ubiquity of shame in our present world or its central position in the group of discomforts that plague modern man, I would mislead you by ignoring the history surrounding shame.
All this is necessary if we are to understand the nature of shame today. Changes in the experience of shame, in the realm over which it holds sway, have caused drastic alterations in civilization itself. The book ends with some suggestions about the role of shame in this dangerous modem culture of emotional explosion.
This book may well define a paradox. If it is successful, all of us will know more about the nature of shame and its place in the panoply of emotions. The work of Freud changed—indeed may be said to have formed—the civilization that followed it. From the contributions of classical psychoanalysis it became permissible to investigate the realm of unconscious life, to study and enjoy our sexual selves in a new way, to disavow the shame that had protected our private and secret thoughts from public view. Now, thanks to the clues granted us by the work of Tomkins, shame and all the emotions related to it become capable of study in an entirely new mode.
Who will we be next, what sort of society will follow from a thorough and general understanding of human emotion? How will shame change when it is no longer so secret? What will happen to us as we become aware of this powerful force that has done so much to bring us into the present?
But I rush too quickly to the end of my book. Let us start by investigating the biology of emotion, the hardware required in order for us to have emotions.