Abstract
This article develops a Lacanian theory of shame in dialogue with the work generated by shame pioneers in the post-Freudian traditions. The article’s hypothesis is that shame is an index pointing to ontological lack. The neologism hontologie combines the French words for shame and ontology; it is a negative ontology proper to Lacan’s theory that the subject lacks an essential core of identity or unity. Key concepts used to theorize shame in the psychoanalytic literature are examined, including the self, ego, and the gaze. These concepts are revised and incorporated into a Lacanian theory of shame starting with Lacan’s mirror stage through the evolution of his work to include the object a, the partial drives, and the fundamental fantasy. In a cross-theoretical dialogue, shame is described in terms of the Imaginary and Symbolic registers. The article also addresses the misconception that Lacanians ignore the importance of affect.
Although Lacan discusses shame throughout his oeuvre, he did not develop an explicit theory of shame as he did for anxiety in Seminar X (Lacan, 2014). Beyond his various commentaries on shame, this article traces an implicit theory of shame that runs throughout Lacan’s oeuvre. The basic hypothesis of this article is that shame, beyond being a painful affect that is contingent on developmental or experiential circumstances, is an index pointing to the ontological lack at the heart of the human being. In this context, shame is the always-present possibility of the exposure of the subject’s ontological lack to the other/Other as the other/Other is always-already dialectically inscribed in the co-constitution of the subject. 1 Shame as an index of lack resonates with Levinas’s (2003) observation that shame is the disclosure of the insufficiency and vulnerability at the heart of the human condition, to which we are “riveted” and which, as constitutive of our very being, can never be left behind (pp. 63–64). This examination of shame borrows Lacan’s (2007) neologism from Seminar XVII—hontologie—where he combines the French words for “shame” (honte) and “ontology” (ontologie; p. 180). Although Lacan (1998) created this neologism while discussing the student protests of May 1968, hontologie is used here to emphasize that, for Lacan, ontology is a negativity—a (pre)-ontology appropriate to a divided subject that lacks “wholeness” as well as an essential kernel of identity (p. 29). And since shame is posited as the index pointing to this fundamental lack, it can be understood as a facticity of the human being. As the philosopher Hyldgaard (2003) writes, “shame is the definition of being a human” (p. 238).
Although shame is being developed here in its hontological dimension, for clinicians, shame is most often directly encountered as a painful affect. As early as the 4th century
The phenomenology of the affective experience of shame varies, but frequently the shamed one wants to disappear from the scene by dropping into an abyss or running away and hiding, but paralysis inhibits flight, leaving one exposed and vulnerable. The face blushes and burns while, in especially painful episodes, there is a feeling of being lacerated and dismembered by knives or the cutting memories of the shame-inducing event (Wurmser, 1981). Because of the pain associated with shame, events or memories that evoke it are often defensively repressed. In the analytic encounter, shame can emerge abruptly, paralyzing speech in either the patient or the clinician, or it can be experienced as a slow burn. This pithy observation by Yorke et al. (1990) captures the challenges associated with working with shame: “it has been rightly said that guilt brings material into an analysis while shame keeps it out” (p. 381). 2
Philosophical assumptions about the nature of being human influence our theories, which then guide analytic aims and treatment interventions (Verhaeghe, 2004). Although the aims of analysis are conceptualized in different ways depending on the moment of Lacan’s teaching, one aim of analytic work involves the ethical obligation to take responsibility for our constitutional lack. Realizing that shame is the index of ontological lack challenges cherished fantasies of wholeness. This realization is essential in order to traverse the fantasy that we could achieve a state of rapport in our relationships or harmony in our lives. Rather than adopting perspectives that theorize shame as a toxic or pathological affect or merely clinically irrelevant and instead recognizing that shame is an inevitable aspect of being a lacking subject can change how a clinician listens for and works with shame. This is important because the emergence of shame is an indicator that the ego is no longer covering lack with the defensive illusion of coherence, which creates the possibility for psychic transformation.
Because Lacan did not work out an overarching theory of shame, key ideas from the post-Freudian traditions, which frequently describe shame as a feeling where the “whole self” is exposed as flawed, will serve as guideposts for recognizing the dynamics of shame that are implied throughout Lacan’s teachings. 3 The work regarding shame done by analysts in these traditions is rich in clinical detail and has been fruitful in describing shame structurally in terms of the Freudian agencies of the ego and ego ideals. However, post-Freudian theories of shame rest on assumptions about the nature of the self and identity that are antithetical to a Lacanian understanding of these concepts. For Lacan, the self, equated with the ego, is a méconnaissance (“misrecognition”) rather than a “true” instance because it is based on identifications derived from the Other, creating an inevitable condition of alienation. Instead, Lacanian theory posits that we exist as a divided subject. Also, much post-Freudian psychoanalysis is based on a developmental linear temporality wherein the human infant passes through various biological and psychic stages, culminating (ideally) in physical and psychological maturity. In contrast, for Lacan, there is no final developmental goal or maturational destination because the lacking subject is a manque-a-être (“want-to-be”), always in the process of becoming. Thus, these basic assumptions about ego, identity, and subject lead to different conclusions regarding human nature and the aims of treatment. 4
Post-Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives
In a 1990 article, Yorke et al. report on the work done by their colleagues in a study group at the Anna Freud Centre in London on the development of shame from infancy through latency. As a starting point toward a developmental account of shame, Yorke et al. (1990) list 12 key ideas that were addressed by most analysts writing about shame (p. 380). While acknowledging the loss that comes with condensing several ideas into one, Yorke et al.’s 12 points are gathered here into four general ideas that commonly appear in psychoanalytic theories of shame:
Shame involves feeling that the “whole self” has been exposed as flawed in relationship to its ideals, which can evoke intense feelings of vulnerability and worthlessness (e.g., see Lynd, 1958; Wurmser, 2015b). Structural accounts of shame describe these feelings of vulnerability and worthlessness as the result of the failure of the ego to live up to the standards of its ego ideals (Piers & Singer, 1952/1971). Shame is a powerful and painful affect which involves a global experience that can obliterate all other feelings and thoughts (Yorke et al., 1990). Related to the idea of the “global” or “whole” self, shame is linked to the necessity of bodily and psychic boundaries, and is thus sometimes considered as a failure to achieve self-integrity (Lewis, 1987; Spero, 1984; Wurmser, 1981).
Shame involves an intense feeling of exposure or fear of being exposed in one’s bodily or psychological nakedness, “in which innermost secrets and what are felt to be the mental equivalents of body content are bared to view” (Yorke et al., 1990, p. 380). This exposure always involves an observer, whether the observer is an actual other person, an imagined other, or an internalized other (e.g., see Piers & Singer, 1952/1971; Sandler et al., 1963; Wurmser, 1981; Yorke et al., 1990).
Shame often involves the desire to give up one’s identity to secure the acceptance of the other because shame is not a fear of punishment but rather the result of fears of abandonment and loss of love due to the exposure of one’s unworthiness. Accordingly, shame often involves the desire to give up one’s identity to secure the acceptance of the other (e.g., see Ikonen & Rechardt, 1993; Kilborne, 2002; Kinston, 1987; Piers & Singer, 1952/1971; Wurmser, 2003).
Shame is often experienced as a surprise—an affect that erupts unexpectedly. Yorke et al. (1990) point out that as the affect of shame develops fully, it floods the psyche and there is no possible defense against it; one can only learn to avoid social situations that trigger shame (p. 405).
Lynd (1958) captures the intertwined nature of these dimensions of shame: Shame is an experience that affects and is affected by the whole self. This whole-self involvement is one of its distinguishing characteristics and one that makes it a clue to identity . . . Coming suddenly upon us, experiences of shame throw a flooding light on what and who we are and what the world we live in is. (p. 49)
To summarize the dynamics listed above, shame can be described as a process: shame emerges as an affect when there is a failure of the ego to live up to its ego ideals in the presence of an important other (either an actual or an internalized other), resulting in a sense of global defectiveness and loss of the integrity of the “whole self.” The observed failure of the ego to manifest its ego ideals evokes an intensely painful feeling of bodily exposure and psychic nakedness. Because of the exposure of one’s global defectiveness, shame elicits fears of abandonment and loss of love, resulting in a desire to change one’s identity in order to forestall these losses—or, to put it differently, to be what the other desires.
Before going on to consider a Lacanian view of shame, it is necessary to clarify those concepts related to shame that Lacan revised in his “return to Freud”: the ego, the ideal ego, and the ego ideals.
The ideal ego and the ego ideal
In “On Narcissism,” Freud (1914/2001) introduces two aspects of the ego that are used in formulations of shame: the ideal ego and the ego ideal. Because Freud did not clearly delineate the ideal ego from the ego ideal, the two concepts became conflated and the ideal ego was assumed to serve the same psychic function as the ego ideal. Strachey (1927) writes that Freud “seemed to use the terms [ideal ego/ego ideal] indiscriminately” (p. 9). Lacan (2006c) did not agree with this assessment, saying that “Freud was never even slightly sloppy in his use of signifiers” (p. 563). Lacan (2015) also emphasized that “[p]henomenologically speaking, the ego ideal and the ideal ego absolutely do not serve the same function” (p. 331).
As Freud (1914/2001) points out, the unity of the ego does not exist at birth; there are only the autoerotic instincts. Freud postulates that there must be a “new psychical action” that transforms the original instinctual autoeroticism into primary narcissism; thus, narcissism requires that the ego already exists as an object in order to receive the libidinal cathexis of its own self-love (p. 77). It is Lacan (2006b) who discovers this “new psychical action” in his theory of the mirror stage (which is described below), wherein the primitive ego is formed as an object via the infant’s inborn capacity for identification with the gestalt of its image in the mirror. The primitive (or specular) ego identifies with the form of this unified gestalt as “I” or “me.” 5 The ego comes into existence through an act of misrecognition when it takes on this outside image of apparent wholeness as its inner essence or identity.
Narcissism—the turning of sexual energy (the libido) toward the ego as an object of its own self-love—is not a solitary intra-psychic phenomenon but is linked to the reflection back and forth between the gestalt of unity in the mirror and the child’s primitive ego that identifies with the image. Freud (1914/2001) intuits this mirroring when he writes that primary narcissism is not readily observable but can only be inferred through the tendency of parents to see themselves in their children and to “ascribe every perfection to the child . . . and to conceal and forget all [of the child’s] short comings” (p. 91). For Freud, primary narcissism is revived when the parent sees their ideal ego reflected back to them in their imaginary identification with the fantasy of perfection and immortality that they see in their child.
Freud (1914/2001) goes on to say that once the ego has formed as a unity, “pathogenic repression” proceeds from the ego when libidinal instinctual impulses “come into conflict with the subject’s cultural and ethical ideas” (p. 93). These “cultural and ethical ideas” become the ideals that the individual has recognized not merely intellectually, but also as a set of values to which the ego submits itself out of self-respect (p. 93). The person “has set up an ideal in [themselves] by which [they measure their] actual ego” (p. 93). Thus, the Freudian concept of an ego ideal is not a reified object or agency but a value, an ethical idea that is so dearly held that the ego willingly submits to it; if the ego fails to submit to it or if there is a conflict between ideals, the ego represses the associated ideas.
As noted above, many theorists posit that shame is the affect that emerges if the ego is observed by an important other in its failure to measure up to its ego ideals, resulting in a global collapse of the “whole self” along with a collapse of self-worth and self-integrity (e.g., see Lynd, 1958; Piers & Singer, 1952/1971; Wurmser, 2015b). However, like Freud, Lacan does not use the language of “the self” in theorizing our subjective sense of a persistent identity and considers the idea of an autonomous ego that “has” attributes such as self-integrity or wholeness a mistaken notion. For Lacan, the idea of a “whole self” or “self-integrity” is based on a radical misunderstanding of the nature of identity, which is a function of the ego, a reified object. The word “identity” comes from the Latin phrase idem et idem, which literally means “the same and the same” (Green, 2010, p. 341). This idea is illustrated in Lacan’s Seminar IX, where identity is demonstrated by the mathematical equation A = A (Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2009, p. 392). Both the Latin phrase idem et idem and Lacan’s formula demonstrate the necessity of doubleness, as in mirroring, rather than wholeness in order to create an “identity.” Lacan demonstrates that the feeling of a persistent identity—“me-ness” or “self-hood”—is not an essential trait but is obtained from the Other via the ideal ego and the ego ideals—two functions of the ego (Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2009). The subjective feeling of being “me” or “myself” is always based on a fragile fiction with no underlying authentic true “self” or essence; rather, identities are continually created and dissolved in order to orient and reorient ourselves to our always-changing world. In contrast to the ego, the Lacanian subject is not an entity but a lack-of-being, a process of becoming through the movement of desire.
The mirror stage and beyond
By the early 1950s, Lacan had developed the three registers of the psyche—the dimensions of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. With these conceptual tools, he was able to delineate the ideal ego from the ego ideals. Briefly, the ideal ego is a picture of completion—a mirage of perfection that we strive for yet cannot obtain; it is a protective and defensive maneuver that shields one from the trauma of the Real. The ideal ego is formed in the Imaginary register of sameness and dyads. The ego ideals are the privileged ways the child identifies with the values and signifiers of its caregivers in order to feel secure by being the answer to the Other’s desire. Ego ideals are linked to the Symbolic, the register of signifiers, ideas, and culture. Lacan’s revisions of the ideal ego, the ego ideals, and identity now allow us to develop an account of shame from a Lacanian point of view, beginning with the mirror stage.
As spelled out in Lacan’s (1938) entry “La Famille” in the Encyclopédie française on the family complexes, the mirror stage is a necessary answer to the psychic crisis of the most archaic of all complexes—the weaning complex. 6 In this very early piece, Lacan describes the weaning complex as a nonverbal and unconscious imago that plays a role in psychic organization. Lacan (1938) points out that with the cessation of breastfeeding, the infant is confronted with the prematurity of its birth as manifested in its helplessness and dependence on the other human being for vital survival—the Freudian Hilflosigkeit—and that weaning “leaves in the human psyche the permanent trace of the biological relationship it interrupts” (p. 14). 7 Weaning as separation from the mother is thus the first time that a vital (biological) tension requires a psychic solution for the infant’s helplessness. The infant must develop a sense of “me” as a bounded and separate being while retaining a relationship to the other. Notably, this solution occurs before conscious representation of the solution is possible, because the ego is not yet formed. This unrepresentable psychic impression of primal separation has a kernel of the Real at its core and results in a permanent dialectic between the helpless infant and the first other upon whom it is completely dependent. 8 Although Lacan’s conceptual language was still developing, the weaning complex is an early picture of the way that identity is dialectically co-constituted through the Other.
All three of the distinguishing elements of shame as described by Aristotle (see above) are present in this primal scene: the infant’s dependence, vulnerability, and lack of control over the Real of its body are the “contents” that are exposed to the gaze of the first other, whose responsiveness to the infant veils the abyss of helplessness with gestures, images, and words. The boundaries of the body are not yet psychically established, and the response of the Other only partially and sometimes succeeds in containing the painful agitations of the Real that evoke the infant’s cry. When the ego takes on an identity from the Other—in order to feel secure in its relationship to the Other—and the protective veil of words and images with which the ego identifies is stripped away, naked being and constitutional lack are exposed to the gaze of the desiring Other, evoking shame. Lacan will go on to elaborate the infant’s “psychic solution” to the weaning complex in the mirror stage, which begins at around 6 months of age.
The mirror stage is the developmental period when the sense of being “me” is installed. 9 During this period, an external image is seen and taken in from a reflection of oneself in a mirror or the eyes of another. The mirror-stage identification generates a transformation for the helpless infant where “the I is precipitated in a primordial form,” giving rise to the primitive ego via assuming the specular image of its alter ego, usually the mother (Lacan, 2006b, p. 76). The infant’s identification with the specular image of the static and reified body of the other and the accompanying defensive fantasy of “wholeness” is Lacan’s revised version of Freud’s “ideal ego.” It provides the first representation of a body with a boundary and limits that separate the infant from the body of the other, giving the infant its first defense against helplessness. 10 Lacan (2006b) describes the ideal ego as “an orthopedic form” (p. 78) of totality because it covers over the reality of the immature and not fully developed infant’s lack of motor control and chaotic bodily impulses and movements, which Lacan calls the “fragmented body” or corps morcelé (Lacan, 2006b, p. 78), with corps morcelé referring to the French term, which often goes untranslated and is familiar to Lacanians. The image of the other is idealized and identified with only because the subject recognizes its value in integrating inner chaos (Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2009, p. 396). At the core of the ego is the mistaken belief that we are equivalent to our image; thus, the ego provides a protective but alienating identity.
Lacan (2006b) describes the infant looking in the mirror as “jubilant” (p. 76) because it anticipates a future mastery and control over its body. However, this future mastery is illusory and never completely arrives because the “turbulent movements” (p. 76) that animate the living body never cease. In his later work, Lacan theorizes these turbulent movements as the partial drives. Because of these drives, there will always be discord between the ideal ego and the excitations and agitations of the lived organism. So, as soon as the sense of being “myself” and of having my own body is established, there is always-already an irremediable split, a discordance, between the primitive ego and the organism—or what Lacan later comes to call a split between existence and being. 11
Lacan (2006b) goes on to say that the ideal ego creates a “fictional direction” for the ego because it generates “the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development” (p. 78). In other words, the ego works to maintain the illusion of unity and mastery over its bodily functioning, as well as projecting the ideal ego’s imaginary attributes of permanence and substantiality onto things in its world (Muller, 1982). The specular image of the ego creates a “formal fixation, which introduces . . . a certain discordance between [a person] as organism and [their] Umwelt, [it] is the very condition that indefinitely extends [their] world and [their] power” (Lacan, 2006a, p. 90). So, although the ego creates a world of objects, as a reified and static object itself, it poses an obstacle to the movement of desire that can inhibit subjective transformation. Shame is an indicator that the alienating armor of the ego has cracked, creating the potential to restore the flow of desire.
Following his early article, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (Lacan, 2006b), Lacan (1991) went on to elaborate the mirror stage via his double-mirror construction, where he demonstrates how it is signifiers that mediate and structure the Imaginary relations between interpersonal others and reality. 12 The infant not only sees the image of the other as an alter ego, but also looks to first and second others (those serving the maternal and paternal functions) for affirmation that it is manifesting the attributes, qualities, or values that are pleasing to them in order to be the answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire. The signifiers spoken while affirming the image (“That’s you! You’re so smart!”) provide the coordinates that orient the child to the image. The idea of “image” is changed: “‘image’ now refers to the representations and meanings people construct by using words, rather than impressions the visual system processes” (Vanheule, 2011, p. 3). The result is that the desiring subject is divided and fragmented by different signifiers; it experiences “unity” only through the imaginary ideal ego.
The ideal ego assures you that you are (that I am), but leaves undefined the questions of identity (What am I?) and intentionality (What does the other want?)—questions that are addressed by the ego ideals. The traits that the subject manifests in order to cover over its own lack and to “feel [it]self both satisfactory and loved” constitute the ego ideals (Lacan, 1998, p. 257). These signifiers are “privileged discursive elements: specific traits and characteristics of others that arrest a subject’s attention, and are unconsciously adopted to the extent that they are considered to imply an answer to the riddle of the other’s desire” (Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2009, p. 397). Although assuming signifiers of the Other covers over lack, the movement of the desiring subject becomes frozen and fixed in a static identity, which may offer a momentary feeling of security in the face of the Other. However, since there is no single signifier that can represent a person, inevitably there will be moments of inconsistency where the ego’s identity fails to shield us from lack. Thus, the subject is divided in two ways: (a) the ideal ego offers an illusion of unity and ideality as it covers the chaos of the body and provides the illusion of boundaries and of control and (b) the ego ideals hide the gaps between the signifiers that divide the subject, precluding any possibility of the subject’s wholeness or completion. When the ego’s identity no longer veils the subject’s division, lack is exposed to the constitutively present Other, and shame emerges.
The partial drives
Prior to Seminar X (Lacan, 2014), “lack” could be understood in its relation to the metonymy of desire as the void or gap between signifiers. However, from Seminar X onward, Lacan’s emphasis shifts from the Symbolic and the logic of the signifier to the Real and subjectivity at the limits of the Symbolic (Vanheule, 2014, p. 4). As Lacan’s theories evolved, the concepts of “lack” and “void” that are constitutive of the divided subject are shown to be grounded in the materiality of the body qua organism (the body as Real), which is riddled with the unrepresentable “substance” of jouissance (the partial drives) and its remainder, the object a. This shift in conceptualizing the Real further links the Lacanian subject to shame because the ego can never fully control the body qua Real. With the invention of the object a, the “turbulent movements” that animate the infant’s body in the mirror stage become the partial drives. “At this point, we come up against a central element of identity formation: lack, the impossibility of ever answering the tension of the drive” (Verhaeghe, 2004, p. 158).
The partial drives are a hinge between the Real of the body qua organism and the psychic identity formed via the Imaginary ideal ego and Symbolic ego ideals. The partial drives are linked to those openings in the body where a dialectic exchange takes place between the caregivers (generally the mother and father figures) and the infant. 13 The other’s bodily ministrations initiate the first effort to respond to the infant’s cry and “turbulent movements” by representing the infant’s bodily tension (jouissance) through speech. However, there is always a remainder of the bodily experience that cannot be signified; the unrepresentable “leftover” in this process of regulating the infant’s internal sensations is the object a, the source of the partial drives. The object a is not a material object but represents a hollow or a lack that can be filled by objects but never in a fully satisfactory way. Throughout a person’s life, layers of signifiers and associative meanings create ego identities along with assumptions about the Other in an (unsuccessful) attempt to fill this hollow and mask the lack. This effort is unsuccessful because wholeness can never be achieved—the object a is continuously generated as a remainder of the signifying process. It is this structural impossibility that generates the “global” feeling of defect associated with shame, rather than any particular deficiency or specific failure to live up to an ideal. The impossibility of permanently containing or regulating the partial drives constitutes shame as the human being’s hontological condition.
The gaze
As Aristotle and others have noted, a key constituent element of shame is the exposure of this lack to the other. Yorke et al. (1990) point out that “shame always has an external as well as an internal referent . . . There is always an awareness of an observer, a possible observer, a former observer, or a fantasized observer” (p. 380). Spero (1984) also emphasizes exposure, positing that shame is located on the border between the external and the internalized. Lacan had already problematized this inside–outside binary with his concept of extimité. Extimité is a neologism created by Lacan to express how the subject’s most intimate “interior” is also the alien “exterior” that resides within, like a foreign body (Miller, 1994). From a Lacanian point of view, because the human is constituted by and perpetually remains in a dialectic with the Other, there is always-already an “alien observer” installed in the psyche. In his later writing, Lacan links the presence of an internal Other to the gaze as the object a of the scopic drive; but even before that, an observing gaze—necessary for the experience of shame—is already present.
In the mirror stage, the gaze is implicit in the form of dialectical tension between the ideal ego—which is a result of the reflection back and forth between the alter ego’s specular image and the infant’s primitive ego—and the drive impulse, and again in the affirming gaze of the Other in the formation of the Symbolic ego ideals. Although the ego ideals are formed by privileged signifiers with which the subject identifies, they also mark a virtual internalized location. When the infant at the mirror turns to the Other for their signifiers of recognition and affirmation, the infant also internalizes the gaze of the Other as a witness: “the ego-ideal represents the point where the subject sees [its]self as [it is] seen by others, and from where the Other sees the subject as the subject wants to be seen” (Vanheule, 2011, p. 4). Thus, the ego ideal is the basis of an always-present internalized witness, whose recognition we desire and whose gaze has the power to shame us. In discussing his admiration of Sartre’s (1943/2018) account of shame, Lacan (1998) adds: The gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame . . . the gaze I encounter is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other . . . If one does not stress the dialectic of desire, one does not understand why the gaze of others should disorganize the field of perception. It is because the subject in question is not that of reflexive consciousness, but that of desire. (pp. 84–89)
The fundamental fantasy
In the later work of Lacan, the ideal ego and the ego ideals become the Imaginary and Symbolic frame of our fundamental fantasies. The fundamental fantasy is an unconscious scenario that orients the subject in its relation to the Real of object a (Miller, 2013). Lacan’s formula for the fundamental fantasy ($ <> a) can be read as the split (divided) subject in its fantasy relationship to the object a, the most radical and irreducible alterity. The <> poinçon at the center of the formula represents the Symbolic–Imaginary fantasy frame (i.e., the ego ideals and the ideal ego of the mirror model) through which the split subject relates to the object a, the remainder of the Real. When these veils of fantasy that cover the Real are momentarily stripped away, the ego is “mortified,” and the divided subject is suspended over the void without any Symbolic or Imaginary coordinates in a state akin to the primitive agonies of Winnicott (1974) and the nameless dread of Bion (1978). Being able to modify the Symbolic and Imaginary coordinates of the fundamental fantasy implies the necessity of being able to endure the exposure of the unprotected divided subject to the gaze and bearing the shame that arises when the veils of fantasy that cover lack no longer function.
The fragmentation induced by shame can generate depersonalization and dissociation as the constraining and alienating armor of the ego’s fantasy of unity and of possessing an integral identity breaks down. As Lacan (2006c) points out, when the armor of the ideal ego breaks down, The illusion [of the ideal ego] fades along with the quest that it guides, confirming that the effects of depersonalization observed in analysis, in more or less discrete forms, should be considered less as signs of a limit than of a breakthrough [emphasis added]. (p. 569)
If the clinician understands shame as a breaking down of the ego’s illusory defenses rather than a limit or obstacle to achieving an “authentic” identity, shame can be treated as signaling a breakthrough in the psychoanalytic treatment. In those moments, the ego is no longer asserting its illusory control and the clinician is working instead with the open possibilities of the always-in-process divided subject. Though painful, the mortifications of shame can deal a death blow to worn-out identities and automatic thinking (i.e., repetitive chains of signifiers). The breakthrough of jouissance can infuse energy into shaping new identities. As the illusion of attaining unity fades, the capacity to endure shame facilitates the acceptance of constitutional lack. When a person has come to recognize that shame is an index of constitutional lack rather than evidence of being globally unlovable or defective, the ego’s identities can become more supple rather than resembling the rigid armor of static and brittle defense.
Although shame as a stripping away of the fantasy of orthopedic totality is momentary, it is a possibility that never ceases and will inevitably be repeatedly actualized. The stripping away of the fantasy that we are whole or complete puts us in touch with our insecurities about who we are for the Other, our lack of control over the body, and our mortality. Shame emerges as we “are” always-already our own witness to the unrepresentable excess of the living body, the object a. For neurotics, the object a is defensively located in the Other in an effort to manage the Other’s enigmatic desire. Imagining how the Other sees us becomes part of the fantasy. Since the gaze is “imagined by me in the field of the other” (Lacan, 1998, p. 84), it takes on the persecutory aspect of the rivalrous alter ego. This explains why Yorke et al. (1990) and others have pointed out that, in shame, “the observer is always experienced in some form or other as disapproving or condemnatory” (p. 381). Wurmser (1981) describes the pain of the gaze: “Shame anxiety . . . is accompanied by a profound estrangement from world and self, present and past. All eyes seem to stare at the shamed one and pierce [them] like knives. Everyone seems full of taunts and mockery” (p. 53). And, as Lacan (2015) says, This is my old topic of the mirror stage, which . . . allows us . . . to conceptualize the renewal of the possibility, which is always open to the subject, of a self-fracturing, self-tearing, or self-biting when faced with what is both [them]self and an other. (p. 352)
Primal shame and secondary shame
Many authors posit that shame has a history as part of the child’s developing world of affective and cognitive experiences, and that it changes over time (Yorke et al., 1990, p. 378). Some describe a “primal” or “elemental” mode of shame, which later evolves into a “secondary” mode of shame that is considered a developmentally more “mature” manifestation of the affect (see Broucek, 1991; Sandler et al., 1963; Spero, 1984; Tomkins, 2008; Wurmser, 1981; Yorke et al., 1990). As will be detailed below, shame has been described as ranging from a preverbal archaic sense of being unlovable with a “mortal wound at the core of being” (Wurmser, 2015a, p. 37) to a more developed affective and cognitive script about the difference between how I want to be and how I imagine I am in the eyes of another person. In this Lacanian reading of shame, the two ends of this continuum would be shame in the Imaginary as one pole where the ideal ego is shattered, leaving the psyche fragmented and defenseless to the other pole of shame in the Symbolic, which emerges when we are exposed as failing to live up to our ego ideals in the never-ceasing but always impossible attempt to be the answer to the desire of the Other.
Shame and the imaginary
Wurmser (1981, 2015b) postulates (through a retroactive psychoanalytic construction of clinical cases) that in the most archaic form of shame, there is a global feeling that the whole self is “unlovable.” In order to comprehend and therefore defend against this archaic, nonverbal sense of global failure, people attribute the painful feeling to three main areas of content: defect, deficiency, and dirtiness linked to the body. However, Wurmser (1981) goes on to emphasize that shame at its core is not only about the body: “one thing is sure, shame is primarily a protection not against bodily exposure in a ‘sexual’ (genital) sense, but against more archaic forms of exposure” (p. 66). He defines the most archaic form of global exposure as a lack of feeling loveable and links this feeling of global unlovability to the reality of the infant’s helplessness and dependence on another person and the traumatic feeling of being abandoned or betrayed by this other. Wurmser (2015b) calls this global feeling of not being loveable “primary shame,” and identifies it as being intimately connected to our sense of self’s most basic boundaries and limits: “This abyss of unlovability contains such a depth of wordless and imageless despair that any more delimited shame comes as a welcome friend . . . Basic shame is the pain of essential unlovability” (Wurmser, 1981, p. 92). He also describes primary shame as “the mortal wound at the core of being . . . the essence of the tragic dimension of human existence” (Wurmser, 2015a, p. 37).
Using Lacan’s understanding of the ideal ego, shame in the Imaginary register is phenomenologically related to Wurmser’s description of “primal shame” as “the mortal wound at the core of being” because the ideal ego is based on the gestalt of a unified body image with boundaries and limits but no essential core. The ideal ego, based on an anticipation of future mastery, offers the primal defense against the chaos of the drive-ridden body. When the fantasy of orthopedic totality is stripped away—that is, when the ideal ego is momentarily exposed as an inevitably failing defensive fantasy—we are confronted with the fragmented body in pieces and the primitive agonies associated with our helplessness and insecurity in relation to the Other: I strongly suspect that Aristotle’s (1926) term for shame—taraché, which literally means confusion, upset, something like going to pieces—may refer to a traumatic state of shame anxiety, a sense of fragmentation, and “wanting to disappear as the person one is,” “wanting to sink into the earth.” (Wurmser, 2015a, p. 33)
As Boothby (2001) explains, the cohesion of the body is an illusion. The gestalt of the unity of the body is formed around a kernel of the Real, and the Imaginary is the skin or veil stretched over the empty Real: “The imaginary becomes the power by which the skin of appearance is stretched over the empty skull of the real. The imaginary is the power of the veil, the power of seduction par excellence” (p. 211). When the veil of modesty is ripped off the living body, shame emerges in the face of lack and fragmentation.
Yorke et al. (1990) point out that there is no defense against shame; one can only learn to avoid situations that trigger shame (p. 405). There is no defense against shame in the Imaginary because we do not have control over the ideal ego in its function of providing an image of bodily cohesion. As Lacan (2006b) points out, Hieronymus Bosch has given us a catalog of horrors that confront one when the protective shield of bodily integrity fragments (p. 76). Shame in the Imaginary is a particularly brutal form of shame, in that the loss of the fantasy of the body’s integrity confronts one with the body qua Real without the regulating and containing power of the Symbolic. The discordance between lived body and body image is impossible to rectify, evoking the shame that is felt in relationship to the failure of the body—for example, loss of control of the bowel or bladder. And there is no defense against the shame evoked by the irreparable discordance between our living body and the body as corpse.
Shame and the symbolic
Wurmser (1981) describes “shame” as both a type of anxiety and an affect proper. Shame anxiety is a specific form of anxiety “evoked by the imminent danger of unexpected exposure, humiliation and rejection” (p. 47). It occurs on a continuum from panic—where shame anxiety is evoked by the trauma of helplessness due to an exposure, humiliation, or rejection—to a specific type of signal anxiety where shame is triggered by a less intense rejection but one that signals the expectation of a more overwhelming rejection or humiliation (p. 49). Once a rejection, exposure, or humiliation has occurred that manifests as a weakness or as a fault, “shame affect proper” ensues. Shame affect proper is described as a complex affective and cognitive reaction pattern that not only encompasses shame anxiety but also entails self-condemnation and attempts to expiate the disgrace in order to prevent further degradation (p. 50). It is a structured affective–ideational complex built around the core of shame anxiety and develops in layers. Shame affect proper is considered a more advanced developmental manifestation of shame than shame anxiety, and is referred to as secondary shame (Nathanson, 1987; Spero, 1984; Wurmser, 1981). In its most conscious or preconscious form, secondary shame is a sense of “doubleness”—there is a painful disconnect between the complex affective and cognitive script about how I want to be seen by others and how I imagine I actually appear to them (Piers & Singer, 1952/1971).
The partial transformation of shame anxiety from a primal “wound at the core of being” to the affective and cognitive reaction pattern of shame affect proper appears to be a similar process to the building up of secondary identifications via the Symbolic ego ideals upon the Imaginary ideal ego. As Verhaeghe (2004) explains, “The body image forms the basic layer of identity, the first alienation in the mirror stage on top of which all further alienations through the signifier of the Other will be stacked” (p. 219). Symbolic shame, like shame affect proper, emerges when the fantasy of living up to the ego ideals is stripped away and the ego’s identity no longer provides a defensive protection against lack. Shame in the Symbolic register fits with other psychoanalytic views that shame occurs when one fails to measure up to one’s ego ideals—that is, the signifiers and values which shape a satisfactory identity. The key difference between post-Freudian models and a Lacanian view lies in the constitutive role of lack and desire: all of the ego’s identities are impossible attempts to be the answer to the enigmatic desire of the Other. When this impossibility is exposed to the witnessing gaze, shame is revealed as the hontological condition underlying human subjectivity.
Conclusion
Lacan and Lacanians have been accused of neglecting affect in their psychoanalytic work. In Lacanian Affects, Soler (2016) argues convincingly against this misunderstanding. As she demonstrates, Lacanian psychoanalysis does not disregard affects, but rather recognizes that (for both Freud and Lacan) affects are an effect of what produces them—jouissance, the partial drives, and unconscious desire (p. 3). Affects, as an expression of lived experience, are of the Real and thus, without the Symbolic register, cannot be deciphered or rendered useful clinically. As speaking subjects, we rely on the language given to us by the Other to provide the words that allow us to “express our feelings.” The relief patients feel when they can name an affect and talk about it does not come about because of access to an unmediated experience with a “natural” bodily phenomenon. Rather, affective storms and bodily excitations are helpfully regulated and potentially transformed through the acquisition of new signifiers acquired in the transferential process of analytic work—in other words, through the Symbolic and Imaginary registers. From a Lacanian perspective, jouissance—the source of affects—must be understood within the subjective logic of each patient’s singular relationship to unconscious desire and the partial drives.
The Lacanian scholar Rabaté (2020) asserts that although Soler’s book convincingly demonstrates Lacan’s interest in affects, she does not achieve her stated goal of presenting a clear and systematic theory of Lacanian affect (p. 116). However, rather than focusing on an overarching theory of affect, perhaps further research could be most useful clinically by demonstrating the logic of specific affects in terms of their relationship to jouissance, drive, and desire, as Lacan (2014) did with anxiety in Seminar X. This article has made an initial step toward that project by working out the structural logic of shame in terms of the Imaginary and Symbolic registers—first, in terms of the ideal ego and ego ideals of the mirror stage, and then from the perspective of the partial drives and the fundamental fantasy. Shame as an hontologie—the index of the subject’s ontological lack—is linked to the primal experience of a brutal confrontation with lack. Bearing hontological shame is the companion to the analytic work of creatively living with and accepting responsibility for our lack.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
