Dynamics of shame and guilt
Publish Date : October, 2024
Whereas counseling and behavioral treatments may focus on helping ― teaching, coaxing, coercing, compelling ― their clients toward specific changes, psychotherapy is different. It various procedures address the patient’s intrapsychic conflicts and contradictions, which means that much of the discourse of treatment comes to be expressed as an exploration around the patient’s lived‑experiences of shame and guilt.
Since the earliest days of psychoanalysis ― and even before Sigmund Freud’s advances ― it has been found that, almost invariably, intrapsychic conflict is organized around conscious and unconscious distress that is associated with shame and guilt. Most religious doctrines recognize this in some manner. Yet despite this longstanding truism, the psychodynamics of these two forces are often confused, both in the course of clinical discussions and in the psychoanalytic literature. What follows is a brief guide as to how to think about the difference between these two complex aspects of our psychic reality.
Shame: Although surfacing in variously contextualized ways, shame is a fundamental sense that “I” do not deserve happiness ― that I must continue suffering. Why must I continue to suffer? One way to think of an answer is that suffering ensures that I “know” that the “me” exists, even in its embarrassment and humiliation. As can be shown, shame is fundamentally based on our egotism’s repudiation of our embodied pleasures, the sensuality of our erotic bodymind. Obviously, although this is its fundamental locus, it surfaces in many different forms. It is always a sense that is engendered between “me” and others, mediated by what psychoanalysts call the internalized “ego ideal.” This amounts to the representation of self-evaluative beliefs such as “if I were to be loveable, I should be such-and-such, which I am not.”
Consider some mundane examples. If I were to lose control of my bowels in the supermarket, the other shoppers would laugh at me, humiliate me, think that I am not an adult. If my parents knew how much I play with my genitals, they would think less of me. If I do not commit this act of theft and violence, the gang will not accept me. Note here that shame is essentially dyadic in its structure ― I am ashamed of this or that about myself in relation to some other person or group.
Shame and the fear of feeling shamed ― as well as the wish to be shamed ― domesticate themselves fundamentally within our embodiment. Often in a form that is preverbal, or that cannot be effectively translated into words. At its origins, shame “represents” itself in contractions and constrictions in the flow of the lifeforce within our erotic embodiment, as well as in our repetitious and compulsive attachment to narratives expressing the thematics of embarrassment and humiliation. It is often especially evident around embarrassment about somatic phenomena ― failure to appreciate or even accept aspects of one’s embodiment (my nose is crooked, my thighs are fat, my labia look funny, my penis is not the way I wish it were, I cannot talk about defecation, my hair is too thin, and so on).
Paradoxically, the prospect of freeing or releasing ourselves from the dynamics of shame almost always terrifies our egotism. Yet this freeing of the psychic energy within us (our vital force that we could call it prāna or ch’i) moves us into that existential‑spiritual awareness in which we experience, as if for the first time, the liveliness of life and the holiness of living shamelessly.
Guilt: In its origins, guilt builds on shame, yet it is propositional and thus potentially able to be more easily rendered in a verbal form. It is a fundamental sense that “I do not deserve happiness because of having done ― thought, spoken, fantasized, or enacted ― something that I should not have done, something wrong or inappropriate, for which I should be punished.” Unlike shame ― which usually feels like this just is the way things are ― guilt has some reference to a why this might be so, even though the “why” may be entirely unconscious. Indeed, a very high percentage of the guilt that rules our lives is not consciously known to us. Like shame, guilt is always based fundamentally on our egotism’s repudiation of our erotic enjoyment and all the sensual pleasures of our embodiment. It is a sense that is engendered from our encounter with whatever is forbidden, and is generated by what psychoanalysts call the internalized “superego.” This amounts to the representation of self-evaluative beliefs such as “because of having done such‑and‑such, of having done something to so-and-so, or of thinking, imagining and wishing something bad, I am unlovable and should suffer punitive consequences.”
It is important to note here how guilt is essentially triadic in its structure ― I am guilty of this or that behavior in relation to standards represented by some other group or ideology. Two other aspects of guilt must be noted by every psychodynamic clinician. As the clinical aphorism goes “guilt demands a punishment.” Also, for most patients, most of their guilt is unconsciously generated. This means that the individual is not aware of ― for example ― “I feel bad about how mean I used to be to my little sister.” This means that psychotherapists often encounter patients who engage, endlessly and neurotically, in self-defeating, self-denigrating, or manifestly self-punishing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors … but they do not know why. As Freud stated it, the original crime is long since forgotten.
Guilt and the fear of feeling guilty ― as well as the wish to be punished ― domesticate themselves within our embodiment. Like shame, guilt represents itself not only in our egotism’s repetitious and compulsive attachment to narratives of sin, punishment, and redemption, but also in contractions and constrictions in the flow of the lifeforce within our embodiment. Guilt can often most easily be inferred from the structuration of our fantasy life, and the way in which fantasies are always conflictually polysemous (they reveal unintended meanings in the act of concealing them).
As with the dynamics of shame, the prospect of releasing ourselves from guilt terrifies our egotism, for such a freeing of the vitality within us catapults us into a spiritual‑energetic awareness and allows us to experience, as if for the first time, the liveliness of life and the holiness of living guiltlessly.
In sum: As discussed more extensively in the Rediscovering Psychoanalysis trilogy, shame pervades our bodymind, consciously and unconsciously, and is generated in a dyadic context, intensely in our earliest years and less intensely thereafter. Guilt pervades our bodymind, consciously and even more often unconsciously, and is generated propositionally in oedipalized or triadic contexts.