Dirty Rotten Shame? The Value and Ethical Functions of Shame

I

Ethical function number one is largely intuitive: Shame is an emotion routed through the eyes and its mise-en-scène is thus specularity and exposure, involving the spatial organization of a spectator who can be external, internal, or both at once. We begin with philosopher Jacques Derrida’s (2002) own account of being

caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat. I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment. Whence this malaise? I have trouble repressing a reflex dictated by immodesty. Trouble keeping silent within me a protest against the indecency. Against the impropriety that comes of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see . . . it is as if I were ashamed naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed. A reflected shame, the mirror of a shame ashamed of itself, a shame that is at the same time specular, unjustifiable, and unable to be admitted to. At the optical center of this reflection would appear this thing—and in my eyes the focus of this incomparable experience—that is called nudity. (pp. 372-373)

The complexity of Derrida’s experience of shame is striking, and its general contours are worth remarking on: We notice the elements of exposure to the other’s gaze, mirroring and reflexivity (i.e., shame about shame), and silence. Shame is preeminently visual; guilt is aural. According to an old Greek proverb, “shame lives on the eyelids” (Carson, 2002). Kurt Riezler (1951) points out that the only two surviving fragments of Aristotle’s Erotikos involve the necessity of shame in the context of the lovers’ gazes: “Lovers look into each other’s eyes, not at other parts of their bodies. For in the eyes shame dwells.” As Riezler glosses the fragments: “sex without love avoids the eyes” (p. 226). Shame may be defined in terms of a desire for concealment from the gaze of another (Darwin, 1998; Freud, 1930). For Jean-Paul Sartre (1956), shame is preeminently a specular emotion. “Shame,” he writes, “is an immediate shudder which runs through me from head to foot without any discursive preparation . . . shame is shame of oneself before the Other. . . . Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the Other sees me” (p. 222). Silvan Tomkins (2008), linking shame to the themes of vision and exposure, characterizes the shame response as an act inhibiting facial communication whereby “the individual calls a halt to looking at another person, particularly the other person’s face, and to the other person’s looking at him, particularly at his face” (p. 352). Shame necessitates an audience, even when that audience is what is least desired, or struggled against.

Unlike the shame experience, which has been theorized consistently as a specular affect that is inherently organized by the fantasy of visibility and disclosure, the feeling of guilt does not have this spectatorial architecture. As Lewis (1971) puts it, “in contrast to the wordless shame experience, in which the whole self is the object of the other’s disapproving look, the experience of the self in guilt is neutralized” (p. 253). Guilt, Bernard Williams (1993) suggests, “is rooted in hearing, the sound in oneself of the voice of judgment” (p. 89). We are now brought up against one of the ethical implications of shame: According to the shame theory we are outlining, a person could for a lifetime harbor a guilty secret, but, since shame is identical to exposure, the feeling of shame is one of already having been exposed to some real or fantasized other. The etymology of expose is instructive: To ex-pose is an adaptation of Latin exponere, meaning “to put out” or “place out.” To place out embodies a different metaphor from that of mere visibility. To place out suggests a spatial image in which various things have their proper place or fit together. “Shame,” writes Carl Schneider (1977),"arises when something doesn’t fit. Thus we experience shame when we feel we are placed out of the context within which we wish to be interpreted. Shame occasions are those when someone or some aspect of a person or group is “out of place”—that is, exposed" (p. 35).

II

This brings us to ethical function number two: The spectatorial and spatial dimensions of shame ground it within the social. In the shame experience, we are interpellated as ethical beings suspended between the private and the public. Discussing shame in Franz Kafka’s work, Walter Benjamin (1999) puts it succinctly: “shame is an intimate human reaction, but at the same time it has social claims” (p. 808). Shame, Elspeth Probyn (2004) elaborates, “always plays on that doubleness of the public and the private, the extraordinary and the mundane. It is perhaps the most intimate of feelings but seemingly must be brought into being by an intimate proximity to others” (pp. 330-331). Another literary figure, Albert Camus, in advocating for Franco-Algerian political interdependence, viewed this doubleness and intimacy within the context of what Constable (1997) calls “a vicissitudinous ethics of shame,” where the affect’s “empathetic potential” functions as “a prompt to discover and understand the other’s pain or suffering” (p. 643).

The ethical force of the shame sense resides in its deep connection to the social bond wherein sharing one’s shame with another acts as a profound way to strengthen relationality. As Helen Lynd (1958) explains, “the very fact that shame is an isolating experience also means that if one can find ways of sharing and communicating it, this communication can bring about particular closeness with other persons” (p. 66). This inherent sociality of shame was described even further by Lynd who is quoted as saying, “when you look at yourself in the mirror, someone stares at you who is not you and yet it is—this is the form of exposure in the shame experience” (Nathanson, 1987, p. 40). Shame can thus be said to communify through its contagious nature. In adult life, shame’s contagious nature is explained by the way in which shame itself is a major source of shame. Few theorists of shame fail to mention this inordinately contingent and contiguous effect. Witnessing someone else being shamed and/or the converse, witnessing when someone ought to feel shame and they are not, is likely to induce shame in response. Pennebaker (1990) pointed out that many citizens of Dallas felt ashamed of their city for many years after the assassination of President Kennedy, even though there was no sense in which Dallas or its citizens were responsible for what happened. Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was from New Orleans.

We can also understand, in this ethical context, why Primo Levi, the melancholic genius who survived Auschwitz only to die at his own hands over 40 years later, wondered why it was that, for so many inmates of the concentration camps, the great moment of jubilation that should have happened when the camps were overrun by the Allies and the prisoners set free never happened. In the chapter titled “Shame” in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi (1988) sought an explanation, concluding that the question of responsibility for what had been done to the prisoners collapsed into a reflexivity in which shame was felt on behalf of themselves, and on behalf of humanity, of the whole human species. The horrific experience of the camps gave rise to an unbearable awareness of self, as a person and as a member of a species such that the occasion of its being brought to the surface, as at the time of the liberation of the camps, submerges the subject in shame. Richard Wollheim (1999) comments:"Levi is telling us that life as it was made, not, of course, by the prisoners, but for the prisoners by their captors, was of such an abject nature that merely to survive it and to go on existing, thinking of oneself as a person as life requires, was a permanent occasion for shame" (pp. 200-201). In Levi’s (1988) own words: “man, the human species—we, in short—had the potential to construct an infinite enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort” (p. 86). Here the “vicissitudinous ethics” of shame appears in the context of one of the most horrible, indeed shameful, events in human history, and it points to the double movement of shame, which produces the very possibility of identity and destabilizes it in the process.

Consider a direct shame event in which the other rejects me. Such an event makes for a most distinct self-boundary, and I may wish to disappear, to hide, to sink into the floor, to isolate—all classic signposts of the shame experience—and thereby seemingly reinforce the boundary between self and other. Yet my differentiation from the other is precisely what constitutes my self, dependent as all identity necessarily is on difference. My disappearance act, my self-differentiation, is necessarily and, at best, provisional. The complex recognition of the self in another that shame evokes demonstrates the ongoing debt to the other for, and in, self-recognition. The shame experience functions, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003a) puts it, on the very “threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality” (p. 38). As the differential between immersion in the other and forms of self-distinction, shame embodies the dilemma and danger of being both one of the crowd and the star performer. Thus, we can understand why Fenichel (1945), in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, relates the effect of shame to stage fright and to social anxiety more generally.

By itself, the rejection, ridicule, or hostility of others cannot provoke shame. For missing in such a view is the connection of shame with group identification. One might feel ashamed when ridiculed, for sound reasons, by a group with which one identifies. However, as Thrane (1979) explains, “if a tribe of savages laughs at my eating habits, I am not likely to feel ashamed. Tourists are rarely bothered by the fact that, by native standards, their dress is ‘outlandish.’” (p. 329). Or, as Edmond Jabès (1993) rather neatly puts it, “the foreigner allows you to be yourself by making a foreigner of you” (p. 10). Shame depends on group identification because, as we have seen, shame is inextricably linked to self-recognition. Such self-recognition often involves recognizing a shortcoming with respect to an embraced ideal. One consequence of the specular nature of shame is that only in the eyes of our own like, our own kind, can we find an adequate mirror. Cooley’s (1922) famous notion of the “looking glass self” points to the ethical basis of shame which structures the self according to three elements: first, our imagining our appearance to the other, then our imagining the other’s judgment of our appearance, and finally, the affective linkage of the two, what he calls the “self feeling,” which is either shame or pride. This linking affect, however, depends on whether the other is, to us, undesirable or alien, since the fully other is not in a position to judge us, to show us by its reactions what our shortcomings are. So if my subject position is among those who are undesirable or alien to me, then I expect them to see me similarly—as odd or perhaps repugnant. Thrane (1979) summarizes it quite brilliantly, “The lust of the vampire is shameless; he cannot see himself in any mirror” (p. 330). It would seem, then, there is no shame without some degree of intimacy. If absolute otherness denies a sense of shame, then so does absolute intimacy. Both strangers and intimates are not likely to elicit shame since intimates have significantly richer sources for appraising character than an isolated act or trait, and strangers have little basis to presume how characteristic it may actually be. Georg Simmel, in his time, was struck by the surprising openness of people who would meet for the first and presumably last time when they shared a train compartment: “Travelling companions who were unknown to one another until an hour ago, and who will not see each other again an hour later, are often prepared to entrust one another with intimacies” (Gerhards, 1986, p. 907). Shame, he theorized, would appear only in relationships that were, in these terms, of the intermediate range.

The final point we wish to make concerning the ethical role of shame in the construction of social relations is to call attention, as Thomas Scheff (2000) has so well, to shame’s function as a signal of threat to the social bond. When Lewis (1971) examined her mountain of clinical transcripts, she found that every shame episode signaled the threat of disconnection. Shame, she argued, is a response to this threat, but it can also appear in the context of a kind of internal theater, in response to the interior monologue by which we view ourselves from the perspective of the other. Shame’s phenomenological status at the interstices of self/other, interiority/exteriority, and intimacy/extimacy provokes moral discovery. For, if in shame, I realize that I am as others see me and not as I would have liked to see myself, then I have discovered a situation in which (a) my interpretation of my self is wrong and (b) I might wish to correct or restore my faulty sense of self. Kohutian self-psychology recognizes that the holistic sense of the self is deeply implicated in experiences of shame precisely because they mark attempts to restore cohesion at times when the self is projected into the world but fails to be recognized (Kohut, 1975). Masochistic affectivity, behavior, and cognition are to some extent underpinned by a defense against this failure of the world to respond, with shame often functioning to defend against the risk of being humiliated or humiliated further (Uebel, 2013). In this more expansive view, shame operates, Gestalt theorist Gordon Wheeler (2000) puts it, as “our essential affective field-scan, our affective instrument for sensing and measuring support in the field” (p. 252). Shame can function, as will see, as a moral compass for moving in the field.

III

We turn now to the third ethical function of shame, namely, its dramaturgical or performative meaning. The subject of shame is like an actor who, while once unself-consciously absorbed in her identity, her lifeworld, becomes now suddenly aware of herself as an actor performing in front of an audience. Shame requires a rather sophisticated type of self-consciousness that depends on there being an other who sees, or sees through, my performance. Gabriele Taylor (1985) observes that the subject feeling shame

will exercise her capacity for self-awareness, and she will do so dramatically: from being just an actor absorbed in what she is doing she will suddenly become self-aware and self-critical. It is plainly a state of self-consciousness which centrally relies on the concept of another, for the thought of being seen by another is a catalyst for the emotion. (p. 67)

In her development of a queer ethics, Sedgwick (2003a) elaborates:

Whenever the actor or the performance artist, or I could add, the activist in an identity politics, proffers the spectacle of her or his infantile narcissism to a spectating eye, the stage is set (so to speak) for either a newly dramatized flooding of the subject by the shame of refused return, or the successful pulsation of the mirroring regard through a narcissistic circuit rendered elliptical (which is to say: necessarily distorted) by the hyperbole of its original cast. As best described by Tomkins, shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performance. I mean theatrical performance. (p. 38)

In this complex set of remarks, Sedgwick takes the subject of shame to be a thoroughly self-aware actor, a subject who has eluded narcissistic enclosure not by acting authentically but by pretending to pretend, by acting in a way such that her acting, her stagecraft, playfully runs through, rehearses, the dialectical nature of the shame play. When shame turns itself inside out, on the stage, it becomes transformative of the self.

There is always this doubleness to shame. Consider an alternative reading of the Hans Christian Anderson tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Now it can be argued that Anderson got it wrong: Far from providing a sigh of relief, the child’s statement of the obvious (that the Emperor is indeed naked) activates shame and embarrassment in the others who until now have been politely playing the game of pretending. From this point on, they can no longer pretend that they do not perceive the Emperor’s nakedness. Slavoj Žižek (2001) glosses it thus: “What makes me feel ashamed is not so much what the Other did, but, rather, the very fact that the Other is not ashamed of what he or she did” (p. 73). Thus, what makes something like the Human Genome Project or the more recent Brain Activity Map, the undertaking of the most complete neuroscientific mapping of the brain’s functional circuitry, so palpable in terms of the ethics of shame is that they open up the prospect of the total transparency of the human being. In theory, if there is nothing left to hide, then the very notion of shame is rendered irrelevant, not to mention the notion of justice, since, as has been pointed out by John Rawls (1971), our most elementary notion of justice involves references to the so-called veil of ignorance: justice has to be blind; it has to ignore the full specific context of those who demand justice, thereby reducing them to abstract equal subjects.

Shame safeguards, or at least supports, the veil of ignorance, and such protection depends on pretense for it to be fully transformative of the self. We turn now to a somewhat unlikely source, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad which tells of the creation of the world through the bifurcation of the Supreme Self into male and female:

In the beginning this was Self alone, in the shape of a person (purusha). He looking round saw nothing but his Self. He first said, “This is I”; therefore he became I by name. Therefore even now, if a man is asked, he first says, “This is I,” and then pronounces the other name which he may have.

He feared, and therefore anyone who is lonely fears. He thought, “As there is nothing but myself, why should I fear?” Thence his fear passed away. For what should he have feared? Verily fear arises from a second only.

But he felt no delight. Therefore a man who is lonely feels no delight. He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together. He then made his Self to fall in two and thence arose husband and wife. Therefore he said: “We two are thus (each of us) like half a shell.” Therefore the void which was there, is filled by the wife. He embraced her, and men were born.

She thought, “How can he embrace me, after having produced me from himself? I shall hide myself.”

She then became a cow, the other became a bull and embraced her, and hence cows were born. The one became a mare, the other a stallion; the one a male ass, the other a female ass. He embraced her, and hence one-hoofed animals were born. The one became a she-goat, the other a he-goat; the one became a ewe, the other a ram. He embraced her, and hence goats and sheep were born. And thus he created everything that exists in pairs, down to the ants.

He knew, “I am indeed this creation, for I created all this.” Hence he became the creation, and he who knows this lives in this, his creation. (Watts, 1963, pp. 83-84)

This passage contains an interesting allusion to the primal shame of the sexual union, here, a protest against its incestuous nature: “How can he embrace me, after having produced me from himself? I shall hide myself.” Yet, rather obviously, the female, hiding herself in the cow, the mare, the ass, and so on, is hiding to be found. The force of what Alan Watts calls here the cosmic game of hide-and-seek depends on the pretense—the maya, or illusion—that it is not merely a game, on a suspension of disbelief whose power is that of renewing again and again the fear of being alone. “Sexual shame,” comments Watts (1963) on this Vedic passage,"is thus the blushing admitting of complicity—the secret enjoyment of what was feared so explicitly that one loses face in confessing it. Therefore the shame attaching itself to sexuality is an integral part of its pleasure, and to maintain it, we will do everything possible not to ‘let the cat out of the bag’” (p. 84).This polymorphous drama of shame, then, is never solely the prevention of the suffering inherent in exposure to ridicule or some debasement, but an attempt to protect against transparency so that some excitement, some pleasure, some renewal, can emerge. Wayne Koestenbaum (2011) cuts to the chase: “Getting excited can be humiliating, if you do not get excited in response to my excitement” (p. 161).

IV

Moving to the fourth functional dimension of shame’s place in an ethical system, we will pick up this notion of shame’s transformative disruption of what we think we know about ourselves. Wollheim (1999) has remarked that “everything that brings home to us who, or what, we are covers us with shame” (p. 201). Certainly this statement is intelligible when we think of trauma’s disruptive power to shock us into being merely human, just a body in pain. It is thus no accident that the primal site of shame is the vulnerable body, just as Freud had speculated. The experience of shame is an experience of our own limits—corporeal, intellectual, spiritual, and social. Shame enters when these limits are approached, and it warns us against intrusion and the threat of dissolution. To protect his vulnerability, “every profound spirit,” insists Nietzsche (1966), “needs a mask” (p. 51). The ethical function of shame provides a clue to something profoundly disconcerting at the heart of human experience, a haunting paradox wherein, as Jacques Lacan (1949/2006) fondly reminds us, our sense of self, our very subjectivity, is inherently illusory. Lacan shows how the social, cultural, and linguistic forms that together shape the child from the outside become woven into the developing subject. The person does not start her career in the world as a subject but becomes shaped by cultural forces that are never fully phenomenologically graspable. That we believe we are the sole architects of our thoughts and feelings, that we believe we are autonomous and cohesive individuals in control of our actions, that we imagine that others—our analyst, for example—knows something about us that we do not, that we feel that others are casting judgment on us—all are aspects of experience that Lacan calls méconaissance or misrecognition. And thus, when we are revealed to be the impostors we are, claimants to an identity that we do not have, we then feel shame. For Lacan (1969-1970/2007), however, this is a kind of productive shame, and so in Seminar Seventeen, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, he proposes that the analyst make herself the very agent of shame, provoking it rather than reducing it. For Lacan, shame is the subject’s ethical relation to being—his own and the other’s.

We may understand this when we think of the unexpected and momentarily disorienting or confusing nature of the shame experience. Lynd (1958) is very perceptive regarding this aspect of shame:

Shame interrupts any unquestioning, unaware sense of oneself. . . . More than other emotions, shame involves a quality of the unexpected; if in any way we feel it coming, we are powerless to avert it. . . . Whatever part voluntary action may have in the experience of shame is swallowed up in the sense of something that overwhelms us from without and “takes us” unawares. (pp. 20, 32)

Her phenomenological approach to shame here highlights the necessity of what we might call the radically mindful dimension of shame, as shame can shock us into a kind of fractured awareness. Sartre (1956), in rather stark terms, compares the immediacy of shame with “an internal hemorrhage” (p. 261). In the other resides the power to rupture any unself-conscious drama, as when Sartre writes about being discovered by another while peeping through a keyhole. The rapid onset of such self-awareness is at first confusing as it triggers “a regrouping of all the objects which people my universe” (p. 255). Confusion so characteristically accompanies shame that the two form a Biblical cliché: hearing the Psalmist’s petition, “let all who seek my life be brought to shame and confusion” (Psalm 70:2), and the plea for retribution, “Let them be put to shame and confusion who rejoice at my fall” (Psalm 35:26).

The disorientation that is bound up with the shame experience always involves a reflexive movement of consciousness. Philosopher Max Scheler (1957/1987) finds in all shame “an act of turning to ourselves” (p. 15). It harbors the “the power to abolish self-deception; shame is the pioneer into our selves” (p. 53). The dynamic of disruption arousing self-consciousness is well illustrated by Scheler:

Even one’s knowing oneself to be seen by someone else is not yet a condition for shame. Although for very different reasons, a very bashful woman can feel as little shame when being a model for a painter, being a patient of a physician, or when bathing in the presence of a servant as she feels with her beloved. If she experiences herself in front of the painter as “given” for aesthetic quality and as a valuable visual model for the arts, the turn-experience will not occur . . . she does not experience herself as individual . . . let us have the painter be for a moment distracted from his original intentions so that the woman begins to feel this happening, and the “painting” disappears . . . the woman will then strongly react with shame while turning to herself. Conversely, let us have the woman feel that her beloved is distracted from her individuality and just looking at her as “a beautiful woman” such that the woman feels he is comparing her with, or she is reminding him of, another woman . . . she will immediately react with shame. (pp. 15-16)

Scheler explains the meaning of his illustrations:

the turning to one’s self in whose dynamics shame has its beginnings does not occur if one is “given” to oneself as something general or individual. It occurs when the feelable intention of the other oscillates between an individualizing and generalizing attitude and when’s own intention and the experienced counterintention have not the same but an opposite direction. (p. 16)

The fourth dimension of shame’s ethical force has then to do with the appearance of shame when we are called out on our misrecognitions, when we are taken to be the impostors we do not wish to believe we really are, to be the false selves that we wished to disavow. At stake here is the opening of a new level of consciousness of the self. Schneider (1977) captures it perfectly: “the undivided self in action gives way to the doubled self. Shame is an act of self-attention” (p. 25). Before we turn to the fifth dimension of shame’s ethical meaning, we are in a position to say something about the primal scene of Western shame: the Genesis myth of the fall. What Adam and Eve bought for us, the story tries to show, is a self-consciousness in which we can take a transcendent perspective on ourselves. The emphasis in the biblical story, writes Jack Katz (1997), is “on the god-like, immaterial, haunting threat of revelation that emerges in the capacity to turn on oneself” (p. 233). The self-revelatory quality of shame is something we both invite and refuse, since the dialectical character of shame reveals itself as at once an experience of exposure and one of mystification. At the moment of revelation, an ashamed person often cannot or will not lift her head to perceive the other’s look, and thus maintains a phantom-like sense of the others whose knowing brings shame. Refusal of the other’s gaze signifies a taking toward oneself the very view presumed to be the one that others would have were they to look. Adam and Eve are in an exquisitely precarious position: In their shame, they try to cover up and they also want to run away, but they know that the other from whom they would wish to escape is all seeing. People look down, Simmel (1924, p. 358) once observed, so that others cannot see how they are responding to the moment, preventing, more specifically, the other from comprehending the extent of their confusion. This is why Sartre (1956) describes shame as a feeling “in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed and dependent being which I am for the Other. Shame is the feeling of an original fall” (pp. 288-289). Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (2003) views shame as the outcome of having sought pleasure and ecstasy as an escape from self-enclosure only to find that pleasure collapses into a state that he likens to nausea, “a riveting to oneself” (p. 64). In shame, consciousness is always forced back on the self—“a self confronted with itself” (p. 68), says Levinas—and in this respect it is not unlike mourning, in which a person becomes exquisitely aware of the self just because she will not surrender the love object that must be surrendered. In both shame and mourning, we seek a relationship with the object from which we are alienated yet still love.

V

Shame’s inherent relationship-seeking quality brings us to the fifth function of shame’s ethical significance: Shame’s contagiousness may be its most profound ethical value since, as queer theorists such as Douglas Crimp (2002) and Sedgwick (2003b) have argued, the identity transforming potential of shame resides in an ability to be altered by the shame of another, not because one necessarily shares the other’s shame but because one does not or cannot; what one shares, rather, is the vulnerability to a shame-induced identity transforming experience that is uniquely one’s own. In the operation of shame, difference is preserved since there is no attempt to erase otherness. Shame thereby emerges as a means for securing an identity’s singularity, its points of differentiation from the other. The capacity of shame to attach to any aspect of the self means that shame allows for the radical indeterminacy of experience. Shame’s antiessentialism functions as a technology for fashioning queer and multiple identities—we recall the Vedic creation story—as the experience of difference. Sedgwick (1993) points out that"shame, as opposed to guilt, is a bad feeling that does not attach to what one does but what one is: one therefore is something. The place of identity marked by shame’s threshold between sociability and introversion may be established and naturalized in the first instance through shame" (p. 12, italics in original).

The respect for difference urged by queer theory’s revaluation of shame derives in no small part from shame’s epistemological status since it is only apprehended as shame of something; it always has an object, and yet that object can be anything. The smallest thing may provoke the most intense shame since even a minor thing can occasion a self-revelation of some magnitude. Shame carries the sense that an inveterate and specific truth about the self is revealed. The matters that one is ashamed about are taken to be fundamental to one’s character (Katz, 1997). But what precisely that truth is remains mysterious. Consider this example from Dostoyevsky (1950): Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov undergoes a degrading police investigation requiring him to undress. When he is commanded to remove his socks, he feels “intolerably ashamed . . . [he] had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the course, flat, crooked nail on the right one, and now they would all see it. . . . It’s like a dream” (p. 587). In the shameful discovery that one regards one’s toes as hideous, is anything implied about one’s total nature or does it speak to some idiosyncratic emblem? The paradoxical experience of shame is tied to the revelation of the existence of a personally powerful symbol, functioning not as the key to self-knowledge, but instead revealing “the existence of an abiding mystery, a personally resonant something-that-has-been-kept-hidden” (Katz, 1997, p. 235).

VI

Turning to the sixth function of shame’s moral relevance, we want to complicate briefly that sense of mystery, since shame’s ambiguous status as concealer and revealer is precisely the site of its ethical value as a guide to what philosophers sometimes call simply “the good.” In his Ethics, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1955) quotes Nietzsche’s declaration concerning the necessary mask of the profound mind or spirit, glossing it thus: “Yet this mask is not a disguise; it is not intended to deceive the other man, but it is a necessary sign of the actual situation of disunion. For that reason it is to be respected” (p. 146). Bonhoeffer speaks profoundly of shame as the symbol of our separation. The sense of shame involves respect for the space that exists between us. What we miss when we are locked into thinking that shame mainly responds to a desire for concealment from painful and unsupported exposure is that there are indeed matters of existence that properly should not be displayed and that call forth shame when they are. Immanuel Kant’s famous confession of shame when he was found at prayer is one such experience (Bonhoeffer, 1955). Shame is felt not because prayer is a negatively valued activity but because it is an intensely private experience. Prayer is no more to be observed casually than when, for example, an engagement proposal is to be overheard by curious parents or one’s journal is to be read by a prying lover. What is intensely private is also that which is most vulnerable, and it requires some measure of protection to preserve its value. R. D. Laing (1969) puts this trenchantly, “The loss of experience of an area of unqualified privacy, by its transformation into a quasi-public realm, is often one of the decisive changes associated in the process of going mad” (p. 21). If shame is that space-creating hesitation that allows us to interrelate flexibly with others and the world, then to collapse that space amounts to a violation, possibly triggering the rigidity of insanity.

What we are proposing is that our status as moral beings, as potential agents of good, must depend on our openness, rather than our resistance, to shame. In his magisterial The Justification of the Good, philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1918) places shame at the heart of his ethical project. “The feeling of shame,” he writes, “is a fact which absolutely distinguishes man from all lower nature . . . it is the true spiritual root of all human good and the distinctive characteristic of man as a moral being” (p. 135). Goodness, in its Western forms, as shaped by the Christian tradition, is an activity most properly belonging to the private realm. This is the meaning of the famous messianic enjoinder, “when you do some act of charity, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing” (Matthew 6:3). In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt (1958) strongly associated the good with the private sphere:"the moment a good work becomes known and public it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’s sake. When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness, though it may be useful as organized charity or an act of solidarity" (p. 74).Shame, especially in its prospective sense, is a guide to the respect that the veiled nature of both truth and goodness demand.

VII

This brings to the last and perhaps most rudimentary function: Shame can comprehend guilt but not vice versa. Guilt is limited to informing us what harms we have done voluntarily or involuntarily to others. Shame, because it tells us what kinds of failings and inadequacies in the self are the source of those harms, plays a more vital role in our moral reasoning, leading us to question our own assumptions and intuitions on ethical issues. Shame, as we have seen, operates as a kind of self-reflective consciousness of one’s being, with a metaphorical audience integral to the moral experience. Such an audience, according to Taylor (1985), marks “the discrepancy between [one’s] own assumption about [one’s] state or action, and that of a possible detached observer-description of this state or action” (p. 66). In Shame and Necessity, Williams (1993), like Piers and Singer (1971), claims that shame

"requires an internalized other whose reactions the agent can respect . . . [who] embodies intimations of a genuine social reality—in particular of how it will be for one’s life with others if one acts in one way rather than another" (p. 102).

This internalization of a moral ideal, Williams maintains, does not in itself make shame morally credible, because a socially isolated person is not well situated to make moral judgments. Nevertheless, a view of shame emerges as concerned with the self in its very ontological essence, and for this reason shame can encourage self-understanding.

If ethics depends on recourse to a sense of one’s place within the social field, then the functions of guilt can be clearly distinguished from those of shame. Guilt, Williams (1993) writes,

can direct one towards those who have been wronged or damaged, and demand reparation in the name, simply, of what has happened to them. But it cannot by itself help one to understand one’s relations to those happenings, or to rebuild the self that has done these things and the world in which that self has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions of what one is and how one is related to others. (p. 84)

Without a shame sense, Williams notes, “the convictions of autonomous self-legislation may become hard to distinguish from an insensate degree of moral egoism” (p. 100). Agnes Heller (1985), counterposing shame and conscience rather than shame and guilt, arrives at a similar ethical conclusion, and asks, “Is it so obvious, so much beyond reasonable doubt, that obedience to an internal authority is always so far superior to an external one?” (p. 39).

Philosophers Teroni and Bruun (2011), in their recent study of shame, guilt, and morality, summarize the moral power of shame:

Shame in its prospective form helps avoid wrongdoing in the first place, and the self-regarding aspects of shame imply motivation to improve oneself that suggest a greater moral value for shame. In a word, guilt, as it were, only treats the symptoms of one’s moral defects; it is only concerned with the defects in our actions. The self-reforming tendencies associated with shame treat the cause; in shame we often focus on the faults in our character that dispose us to perform the misdeeds. (p. 244)

Emerging here is the idea that guilt, while traditionally thought of in developmental psychological terms as being the more “adult” or mature emotion compared with shame, is arguably less useful ethically.

Conclusion

Given revaluations of shame in the humanities, social theory, queer studies, and philosophy, it appears that humanistic psychology is in a felicitous historical position to reexamine the theories that underwrite its therapies. Nearly 30 years ago, Helen Block Lewis (1987) speculated on why it has taken the discipline of psychoanalysis so long to appreciate the central role of shame in their patients’ lives. Her venture that shame is such a contagious and excruciatingly painful emotion that “the witness to it ordinarily looks the other way” (p. 4) raises the question of any discipline’s immunity, and hence, willingness to turn unblinkingly toward it.