The Complexities of ‘Shame’: An Exploration of Human Connection (original) (raw)
Related papers
A feminist politics of shame: Shame and its contested possibilities
Feminism & Psychology, 2019
This editorial piece introduces a special issue on the feminist politics of shame. It locates the special issue in the larger framework of scholarship on feminist approaches to shame and specifically feminist psychological emphases, and contextualises the foregrounding of the productive possibilities of shame for feminist social justice projects. The introductory piece overviews the contributions to the special issue through a thematic lens.
The individual and society: the social role of shame
2018
The feeling of shame has a longstanding role in the relations between individual and society. In this article we shall distinguish between shame and shaming and try to understand the social and cultural function of shame. Even though shame is a feeling that has a physiological basis, the way in which we experience emotions differs from culture to culture since it is the meaning that we attach to an event that evokes the emotion rather than the event itself (Ben-Ze’ev 1996). In order to understand the phenomenon of social shaming in the present we must examine the social origins of this phenomenon in Western culture. The methodology most fitting to examine this cultural construct is the genealogical method, by way of which we shall come to see that shaming is not an essentially new phenomenon in Western culture, but only a new mode of expressing old patterns.
The Phenomenology of Shame: A Qualitative Study
2020
Background: Shame is one of the emotions that a person experiences in a variety of everyday situations and many cases it is annoying. Shame is known as a moral emotion, yet its role in psychopathology has been emphasized. This study aimed to examine the lived experience of shame in individuals. Methods: This research is a qualitative study with a phenomenological approach. This research describes in-depth what shame is and how it is experienced from the perspective of individuals. The participants included eight men and seven women who contributed to an in-depth unstructured interview. A seven-step Colaizzi method was used to analyze the data. Data were analyzed using MAXQDA software (2018). Results: Based on our findings, the eight themes of "physical reactions", "accompanying emotions", "making mistakes", "vicarious shame", "gaze of others", "being subject to judgment", " preoccupation" and three sub-themes of &...
Acute Gendered Shame Demystified
Dicipline Filosofiche
It is widely accepted that the experience of persons from stigmatized groups is inflected by shame. This paper aims to elaborate on the nature of this inflection for persons who are stigmatized on the basis of their perceived gender – primarily, but not exclusively, women. It argues that acute gendered shame (AGS) exacerbates and perpetuates the chronic shame that many of those classified as women are already burdened with. It also indicates how AGS may have the potential to engender a pathological relation to the self in its subject.
Dirty Rotten Shame? The Value and Ethical Functions of Shame
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 2016
Approaching the human condition of shame from an ethical point of view, this essay traces the problems involving the relationship between shame and guilt, and between shame and the social field. Drawing on a phenomenological approach to shame phenomena, the essay explores moral and philosophical theories of shame underpinning our humanistic and psychological appreciation of this most basic human experience, one that, as we suggest, has both positive and negative valences.
Gender facets of shame as resource
Call for papers, 2022
Esteemed colleagues, you are cordially invited to submit a chapter proposal for the book project: "Gender facets of shame as resource".
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2017
Departing from Levinas, this paper will address the significance of shame in contemporary discourse in order to approach what could be called its ethical intrigue. Focusing on its political, social and phenomenological implications, I intend to reconsider the experience of shame as it has been appropriated within the politics of affect and account for its relation to ethics, which alone can reveal its transformative possibilities. Shame will emerge as an affect of proximity whose basic structure of being exposed is an attestation of our constitutive openness to others that towers above the politics of interest and the structures of economy that advance the drama of the Ego.
Shame as a social phenomenon: A critical analysis of the concept of dispositional shame
Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 2004
An increased clinical interest in shame has been reflected in the growing number of research studies in this area. However, clinically-orientated empirical investigation has mostly been restricted to the investigation of individual differences in dispositional shame. This paper reviews recent work on dispositional shame but then argues that the primacy of this construct has been problematic in a number of ways. Most importantly, the notion of shame as a context-free intrapsychic variable has distracted clinical researchers from investigating the management and repair of experiences of shame and shameful identities, and has made the social constitution of shame less visible. Several suggestions are made for alternative ways in which susceptibility to shame could be conceptualised, which consider how shame might arise in certain contexts and as a product of particular social encounters. For example, persistent difficulties with shame may relate to the salience of stigmatising discourses within a particular social context, the roles or subject positions available to an individual, the establishment of a repertoire of context-relevant shame avoidance strategies and the personal meaning of shamefulness. 3 Dispositional shame The concepts of internalised shame and shame-proneness Andrews (1998) suggests that 'high-shame' people have been conceptualised in three different ways i) shame-prone or more likely than other people to feel shame in commonly shame-eliciting situations, ii) frequently or continuously experiencing generalised or global shame, sometimes described as internalised shame or iii) particularly ashamed of some aspect of their behaviour or personal characteristics. Most studies have focused on the first two of these, conceptualising shame as a trait or disposition. Therefore less attention has been paid to specific shame about something, for example related to some kind of stigma. Instead, chronic shame is approached as if it is a property of the individual, existing independently of the contexts in which it might be manifest. Kaufman (1989) has been instrumental in developing the idea of internalised shame. Drawing on Tomkins' (1963) affect theory, Kaufman describes internalised shame as a 'shamebound' personality or 'shame-based identity'. He argues that internal representations of the expression of affects, interpersonal needs, drives and competencies become linked with representations of shame, through repeated experiences of shaming, particularly in childhood. When this happens it becomes impossible to experience these affects, needs, drives and competencies without experiencing shame and the child develops a generalised sense of being unworthy and inferior which persists into adulthood. Therefore, according to Kaufman, someone who experiences a significant degree of internalised shame not only experiences shame frequently in relation to specific situations, but tends to engage in generalised negative self evaluations and carries a sense of personal inadequacy. Shame-proneness appears to be a concept which is less clearly defined than internalised shame. The former term is often employed more loosely and has been used to mean both the readiness with which someone might experience shame and hence the frequency of the emotion, and also the intensity with which the emotion is usually experienced (Gilbert, 1998b). It has also