The Biological Roots of Basic Shame

Joseph Burgoin
Points of Departure
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Shame/Narcissism
29

In one of my earliest posts on this website, written nearly a year ago, I introduced the concept of "basic shame."  Although I often link to that piece in later posts, many site visitors may not have read it.  As an introduction to the current post, I invite you to do so now by clicking here.

Yesterday, a reader sent me a link to an article from the New York Times, about "evolutionary psychology" and an interesting theory concerning the possible value of
depression for the survival of our species. I'm not sure about that theory, but the article did set me to thinking in a physiological mode, about the biological roots of shame.  I'm not a biologist and I can't support my ideas by reference to hard science, but this theory comports with my clinical experience.  It helps me to understand and explain what I've learned about shame in the last 30 years.  Bear with me while I take a detour into Freud at his most speculative.

Most people know that Freud wrote about instincts and the importance of the sex drive; other than psychoanalysts or students of Freud, few people know about the transformation of those ideas toward the end of his life.  While Freud's model of the mind always involved the idea of conflict, in his later theories, he focused on conflict between what he called the life and death instincts.  As a translation of the German Trieb, "instinct" is a problematic word; the idea that there's an "instinct for death" is difficult to grasp; it sounds counter-intuitive.  In my view, Freud was talking about two different principles that govern human biology -- one that promotes life and the preservation of the species, evolving toward diversity and larger unities; the other that represents a tendency of things to deteriorate or fall apart, the biological equivalent of entropy.  In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he says that the purpose of the death instinct is to "lead organic life back into the inanimate state."

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Freud’s Theory of the Id, Ego and Superego: Lost in Translation

Joseph Burgoin
Points of Departure
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Self-Esteem and Self-Sabotage
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Sexuality
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Shame/Narcissism
16

After I had graduated from college with a degree in English Literature, I took an extension course in Introductory Psychology; with five years of therapy under my belt, I had decided to begin graduate school in order to become a psychotherapist and I needed some basic coursework in that area.  I well remember the day the instructor delivered his lecture on Freudian psychology, explaining the tri-partite division of the mind into id, ego and superego.  With great scorn, he presented Freud's theory as if those well-known terms represented actual sectors of the brain; I believe he even drew a pie-chart on the chalkboard, reducing Freud's insights to an absurdly simplistic form, and mocked it. I don't think the instructor's attitude was particularly rare.  Freud has gone into disrepute -- for some legitimate reasons, I suppose; but having read and re-read all 24 volumes of Freud's works, and taught them repeatedly to graduate students, I'm full of regret that more people don't understand how truly amazing, insightful and ground-breaking a thinker he was.  He also won the Goethe Prize for Literature -- he's a fabulous writer.

One of the challenges of reading Freud is the official translation into English, prepared under the supervision of James Strachey at the British Psychoanalytic Institute, between 1943 and 1974.  While a meticulous piece of scholarship, and an indispensable resource for anyone truly interested in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud regularly substitutes clinical-scientific words for the everyday expressive language employed by Freud in German. One of the most important of these concerns the translation of das Es, das Ich and das Uber-Ich into the id, ego and super-ego, respectively.  (These terms actually go back to earlier efforts by Ernest Jones to bring Freud to the English-speaking world; Strachey and his team adopted those translations as they had already gained acceptance.)  A literal translation would be "the I", "the It", and "the Over-I".   Those terms have a very different feel -- less conceptual and scientific, more in the realm of our actual experience.

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Defense Mechanisms V: Idealization

Joseph Burgoin
Defense Mechanisms
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Depression and Bipolar Disorder
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Detours
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Shame/Narcissism
26

Once again we have a concept familiar to most people.  Idealizing a new love interest, hero worship, excessive and unwarranted optimism -- these experiences all depend upon the process of idealization.  They also illustrate the point I tried to make in my last post, that these individual defense mechanisms we're discussing are to a degree artificially distinct categories and don't occur one-by-one.  Idealizing a loved object involves denial of the parts of reality that undermine perfection.  Extreme optimism involves denial of our doubts or questions about the future.  Both processes involve splitting to some degree, where the perceptions or ideas that might lead to a more nuanced view are projected outside.

The process of idealization may take aim at several different objects:  self, experience or another person.  I'll discuss each one of those processes separately, but first I'd like to say something about what drives idealization.  In graduate school, one of my professors once told us, "The worse the object, the more the need to idealize it."  I don't remember which professor said it, and whether he was quoting from another theorist, but the expression has remained with me for nearly 30 years.  In this sentence, the word "object" is used in its
theoretical sense, to mean another person -- as in, "the object of my affections."  Given the emphasis on the mother-infant relationship in my training, I'm quite sure this professor meant that the experience of having a grossly deficient mother is excrutiating for the infant; the more intolerable that pain, the more likely he or she would be to defend against it either by idealizing the actual mother or escaping from her into a relationship with a perfect one in fantasy.

If you pursued the latter defensive strategy, you might spend the rest of your life looking for a perfect object to love.  As described in an earlier post on love junkies, you might cycle in and out of infatuation, believing you have finally found The One this time, only to succumb again to disillusionment.  I'm sure this phenomenon will be familiar to most of you.  Another way of conceptualizing that process is that the person uses the heady and idealized feeling of being in love as if it were a kind of drug to ward off pain.  Perfect love as the antidote to other unbearable emotions.  (Just don't call it an "addiction"; if you've been reading my site for a while, you know how I feel about the thoughtless way people use the language of addiction to describe everything.)

One of my clients, Kay, for several years dated the same two men in rotation.  She'd spend an idyllic weekend with Rod and decide he must be her soul-mate.  Then a week later, he'd begin to grate on her nerves and she'd "realize" that Danny was the right guy instead.  The honeymoon period with Danny would eventually wear off, of course, and back she'd go to Rod.  And on and on.  Helping her to have a more realistic relationship with a man, and with her own pain, was extremely difficult.  She kept me and our work together at a great distance through her preoccupation with these two men, and the continual dilemma over which one to choose.
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The Difference Between Shame and Guilt

Joseph Burgoin
Rules of the Road
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Shame/Narcissism
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Social Behavior
39

According to Wikipedia, the "dividing line between the concepts of shame, guilt and embarrassment is not fully standardized."  Many people use guilt and shame interchangeably, but from a psychological perspective, they actually refer to different experiences.   Quoting from Wikipedia:

"Psychoanalyst Helen B. Lewis argued that 'The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus.'  Similarly, Fossum and Mason say in their book Facing Shame that 'While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.'"

I would go further and say that the action that inspires guilt usually involves the infliction of pain, either intentionally or unintentionally, upon another person.  As an example, in the anecdote I related in my post on envy and jealousy, I once said something hurtful at a dinner party, and on some level, I intended it to be hurtful.  Afterward, I felt guilty about my actions because I could see that I had hurt my friend.  More painfully, I also felt ashamed that I was the sort of person who would behave that way.  Guilt arose as a result of inflicting pain on somebody else; I felt shame in relation to myself.

As a therapist, I find this distinction to be  important and useful.  Many deeply troubled people have very little capacity to feel guilt, for example.  In order to feel guilt about the harm you may have done to somebody else, you must recognize him or her as a distinct individual, to begin with.  Thus a person who struggles with separation and merger issues might not feel true guilt even if he or she were to use that word to describe a feeling.  Many people who display narcissistic behavior often suffer from profound feelings of shame but have little authentic concern for other people; they don't tend to feel genuinely guilty.  This explains why an authentic sense of guilt rarely appears in narcissistic personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder:  guilt depends upon the ability to intuit how someone else might feel and as a result to experience remorse for the pain one has caused.

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Pride and the Healing of Shame

Joseph Burgoin
Destinations
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Relationship Issues
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Self-Esteem and Self-Sabotage
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Shame/Narcissism
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Unbearable Emotion
55

Because I write and think so much about the psychology of shame and its toxic effects, I'm often asked about overcoming shame, to explain how one "recovers" from shame, or whether I have any guidance about "healing shame."  My answers in the past have felt inadequate to me, but a recent session with a long-term client helped me bring my thoughts on this issue into focus.

Stan, a middle-aged married man, has struggled with unbearable shame for most of his life and has relied on the typical defenses against shame described in earlier posts.  In particular, he relies on blaming as his primary mode of defense.  For example, he often rants in silence against his wife whenever they have a disagreement:  he'll mentally complain about her behavior with a sense of grievance, blaming her for the argument.
This has been a life-long pattern in his relationships.  Behind his defensiveness, he has suffered from the sense that he's emotionally damaged in some fundamental way.

During the economic downturn, Stan suffered some reverses in his business that have placed a great strain on his family, largely shifting the financial burden of supporting them onto his wife's shoulders for the time being.  She hasn't criticized him for what has happened nor complained about the weighty responsibility she now must carry.  She recognizes that the economic downturn wasn't his fault but Stan nonetheless feels humiliated and defensive.  It taps into a lifelong feeling that he is damaged and ineffectual.

Recently, Stan has remarked on his wife's increasing moodiness.  Even the smallest things seem to set her off; when they re-connect at the end of their work day, she instantly launches into an account of all the things that irritate her about her job.  She strikes him as angry.  Because he feels ashamed about his limited inability to contribute financially, he tries to be as supportive as possible but finds these "bitch sessions" increasingly difficult to bear.

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