Shame is one of those emotions that nobody ever likes to
talk about, acknowledge or [u]even notice.[/u] The most amazing thing to me as
a psychologist who studies human evolution and the development of the human
mind is how unaware humans have historically been vis-a-vis this emotion. Sure,
the ancients had a word for shame, but there was really no significant
[i]study[/i] into it. Somehow, the etiological relationship between one affect
and another was never explored, perhaps because the world was too
"full" of positive meaning, or too in need of a negative meaning, to
recognize the messy complexity of emotions which act most strongly on our
personality development, which create needs, sensations, thoughts and ideals.
Shame, in its true importance, only makes sense in psychodynamic terms, and so
perhaps humans had to await the "mechanization" of the mind, in
Darwin, Freud, Cognitive Science, and latter day theorizing in various areas of
the social sciences.
Perhaps the most astonishing hypothesis of all, in terms of
how it changes our thinking about ourselves, is that we aren't
"individuals" at all, but expressions of a group phenomena which
finds its "homeostasis" in the coordinated functioning of relating
minds. When the individual is seen in this respect, at various levels, we can
make out the "logic" of organism-environment coregulation. There is
"one" thing happening, but it is split up between individual
organisms. My mind is built to "care" about your facial responses,
vocal tones and body language. I want, in a very general way, positive feedback
from my environment.
Of course, one could also argue that all animals are
"fitted" to their environments; indeed, they are. But it is purely
physical. The mind of one animal does not "sense into" the mind of
the other the way our minds manage to attend in very specific ways to complicated
mental assumptions implicit in our every moment of thought and perception. We
think, in short, as "humans". The "human", it seems, or is
often thought, is simply me. But this is wrong. Much research in developmental
psychology has shown that the human mind does not become "human" in
the absence of the presence of another face. Somehow, the brain wont grow
without the 'spark' of moving faces, gesticulating body's and effervescent
voices. When that happens, the eyes follow, the mind is 'activated' and brought
into being - a being that will become so habitual as to almost seem "my
own", and not social, communal, and relational at its very core.
Consciousness - or human consciousness - exists as it does because of the
other. The "other", is simply what is not you, but what is always
present. It may be interpreted generally as "everything" one can
think or sense i.e. as an object. But this wouldn't be entirely correct, as the
"other" in human beings is most essentially the other person, the
other face, whose activity we probe and whose expressions communicate meanings
that far transcend the processes of ordinary matter.
In any case, why would shame hurt? Or rather, why is it the
most painful emotion, feeling, or affect, known to the human heart? Some
psychologists have defined shame as "interrupting interest", which is
to say, it brings to an end any will or thought in the mind of the individual
currently experiencing it. This is an important point to always keep in the
front of your mind: shames power is its ability to literally "shut
off" your self. So, if the self is important and meaningful - as of course
we know it is - naturally, we will be most phobic and fearful of those
emotional states which bring us to a state of weakness and infirmity. But what
makes shame so special is that it touches at our very highest level of concern:
our interests as social beings, to be liked, to be enjoyed by others, and to
have fun. Shame turns that off. It momentarily says to "nope, sorry,
you're out. Get the fuck out of here!" and there you go, find something
else, like objects, to pass your time. The pleasures of engagement - at least
right now - is not going to happen!
Horrible. No? It is, and this is why evolution, as it does,
needed to adapt. And it did. We evolved psychodynamic techniques to 'get away'
from the perception of shame in ourselves. Yes - this is an interesting irony
in the history of thought. The perception of emotion - shame - is reacting the
same way as an antelope responds to a lion: with fear. But this is all in our head!
How interesting it is, metaphysically speaking, that the mind has become the
new environment in human beings! In any case, the perception of shame induced
dissociative processes that inclined the mind to focus upon meanings amenable
to the needs of the self in the present moment. Every interaction, every cue
and every context, has a preexisting network of connections in the brain that
it acts upon, so that our way of responding really are whats called
"limited cycle attractors" in dynamic systems theory. These are
'basins of attraction' that the meaning-hungry mind is activated when it senses
the cues from the world around it. And shame is it's main foe: it knows it.
Your brain too knows it. And you, like me and most everyone else (sparing only
those who've spent the time to know themselves more deeply) use things like
this:
All of these techniques are dissociative in nature in that
they defocus you from the unwanted perception.
Laughter. Laughter is great, its awesome, but its also
recognized as an effective dissociative mechanism to get the self from feeling
shame in a personal and internal way, onto an external and objectified take on
the action-itself which has prompted the laughter. The psychologist Michael
Lewis says this about laughter:
[i]"laughter, especially laughter around ones
transgression as it occurs in a social context, provides the opportunity for
the transgressing person to join others in viewing the self. In this way, the
self metaphorically moves from the site of the shame to the site of observing
the shame with the other."[/i]
There is also anger. Anger is a response of the self to its
own experience of shame, but at the same time directed towards the cause of the
shame response, that is, another person. Anger is way of moving from the
"frozen mobility"of a shame state into the "firery
assertiveness" of an anger state. It's simply an unconsciously made effort
of the brain-mind to bring the self-affect complex to a state of coherency and
stability (i.e. familiarity), however unstable it really is.
People also just flat out deny the presence of shame in
them. They refuse to acknowledge what they themselves habitually experience,
again, and again, simply because they wont give a perception
"license" in their epistemological universe. If they admit the
perception, and say to themselves, "yes, I notice that", such as for
instance, saying "yes, I notice those bodily feelings; in the gut, dropping
heart, a desire to want to hide, my face in particular", they open
themselves up, as it were, to the "lion" who wants to eat the
antelope. People maintain denial because the thing feared possesses a known
ontological propensity; the antelope fears the lion because lion, its form,
movements and action, have long indicated "threat" to the cells which
make up the body of the antelope. Similarly, the [i]feeling[/i] of shame has
long held the relevant neurons in the amygdala to notice its destabilizing
capacity to the self-system, and so become especially 'charged' in matters
pertinent to the individuals social life - and all the
thoughts, feelings and relevant behaviors that coordinate its social life.
The person who doubts the presence of shame, therefore, has
[u]good reason[/u] to doubt, as his life provides plenty of examples of where
he needs to defocus from the perception of shame in order to "make
coherent" the way social life normally flows in his mind. Indeed,
environments usually spontaneously construct ways of being, so that many people
occupying the same social environment tend to evolve similar ways of processing
the complexities of social life, which often means, the complexities of
shame-inducement.
Thinking, paranoia, misattribution ("I'm just tired,
not shamed", even if the previous circumstance was a social situation that
typically results in shame) are also ways to get the mind away from thinking
about itself in a way that implies being "defective" as a social
person.
All of this is, and exists as it does, because of the
counter pole of pride. Pride is what we think we need to have, to maintain, in
order to survive. But what is pride? It's a state, for sure, but it is a very
general one, one that seems more pervasive than shame, in that it is implicit in
so much of what we do. Pride is embodied, its in how we hold ourselves, use
ourselves, in our motion in the world. Its also present all the time when we
speak, as for instance, right now I can't help but know that as I write, I am
being motivated at a self-conscious level, and so reflexively experience myself
as intelligent, wise, articulate, and all those great things which we usually
wish that others will see in us.
Pride is a powerful force that compels assertiveness. It
asserts in human beings as statements, of the propositional kind, where we say
"so is so". In shames pervasiveness, and prides opportunism, human
beings have evolved grandiose ways of regulating one another's self-states as
they talk about truly useless, meaningless, and often-times factually incorrect
things. These states can even be conceived as being distributed between the
relevant parties, so that they 'act this way' ONLY in these contexts. It is the
specific nature of a feedback with a particular person that leads to these ways
of speaking, thinking and acting. These states can sometimes seem like a type
of 'being' that takes over the humans involved when they fall under its force.
Reality becomes contorted because of pride and the
inclinations of the self to assert itself in matters relating to the 'real
world'. Everyones imagining an wishes fall through in their actions, so its not
surprising, for instance, that an insane person like Adolph Hitler, Josef
Stalin, or Donald Trump, would find supporters, as it is pretty common for people
to "mass aggregate" their individual megalomania onto a 'figure head'
that embodies all their own delusions about what constitutes "good"
and "value".
Pride and shame can be seen as two forces which 'battle' in
the process of human relating. Shame happens when another self does not
recognize "me", which is to say, my needs. When emotions 'sympathize'
with one another, states are shared, and in sharing states, the brain grows and
the mind exults. When one mind reflexively orients to another mind, and
expresses through its outer image - the face - what is felt on the inside, it
is a "shock" to the other minds homeostasis. Something 'wrong' has
happened. If the world were simple, the state would freeze forever and we could
know exactly how we feel. However, evolution is resourceful, so what were left
to see is what can appear to be a confusing morass of emotions. But on closer
look, it is obvious that the mind is noticing a feeling - the shock - when
shame happens, but then reflexively enacts a LEARNED adaptive behavior -
laughter, talking, denial, anger - about
which the know much more about, and our liable to think is "all that is
there".
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