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."

Continue "The Biological Roots of Basic Shame"