A recent exchange on WhatsApp has made me think about the nature of shame. I had politely asked someone to move an extended discussion from a general community group into a group created for that topic. A third person accused me of “naming and shaming” them.
My first response was one of some puzzlement. Can I, in fact, shame another person? I had tended to think of shame as something that happens within us. In broadly psychodynamic terms, I might experience shame when something I have done, thought or revealed comes into conflict with my internal sense of how I ought to be. In older psychoanalytic language, I might think of this as the ego finding itself judged by the superego.
That view is not wrong, but these days it seems incomplete.
Freud gives the superego a key role in self-judgement, although his account deals more with guilt than with shame (Freud, 1930/1961). The distinction matters. Guilt tends to concern what I have done: I have behaved badly and may need to put something right. Shame reaches further into my sense of self: I am foolish, inadequate, unacceptable, or somehow less worthy in the eyes of others. Research on self-conscious emotions has supported this distinction (Tangney et al., 2007).
I cannot feel shame without some standard against which I judge myself. Many of those standards began outside me. Parents, teachers, peers, partners, institutions and cultures all help shape what I come to regard as acceptable. What later feels like an internal voice has a social history. The superego, if I retain that language, is not a private moral machine that appeared from nowhere. It carries traces of relationships and social rules.
There is also something distinctive about being seen. Shame seems to contain an imagined pair of eyes. I become conscious not only of what I have done but of how I appear to someone else. Sometimes that other person need not even be present. I can recall an event years later and feel shame because I can still imagine how I must have looked. Tracy and Robins (2004) place this form of self-evaluation at the heart of self-conscious emotions, while Scheff (2000) links shame closely to threats to social bonds and social standing.
This leads me to distinguish between shame and shaming.
Another person can certainly perform an act that might reasonably be called shaming. They can expose me, mock me, draw public attention to my failure, invite others to condemn me, or portray a minor breach as evidence of some defect in my character. Yet they cannot determine whether I experience shame. I might instead feel angry, amused, confused or indifferent. I might reject the standard by which they are judging me.
The reverse is also true. I can feel deeply ashamed when nobody intended to shame me. Someone may make a mild comment which touches an existing vulnerability. They may not even know that they have done so. In that case, the intensity of my shame tells us at least as much about my inner world as it does about their behaviour.
This makes the phrase “you shamed me” more complex than it first appears. It may mean “your behaviour was designed to humiliate me”. But it can also mean “I experienced shame in response to what you did”. Those are not the same claim.
The WhatsApp exchange illustrates the problem well. Asking someone in a public group to move a discussion elsewhere does expose the correction to an audience. That makes embarrassment possible. It may even evoke shame. But the mere fact that an intervention takes place in public does not seem enough to define it as shaming. Much depends on what is being communicated.
There seems to me to be a major difference between saying, “Could you move this discussion to the group set up for it?” and saying, “You are once again showing no regard for everybody else.” The first identifies an action and asks for it to change. The second moves towards a judgement of the person. One concerns conduct; the other risks turning conduct into character.
This distinction also fits the research on guilt and shame. Guilt leaves room for repair: I did something that I might do differently next time. Shame can make the whole self the object of judgement: this behaviour reveals what sort of person I am (Tangney et al., 2007). It is easy to see why the latter can provoke withdrawal, anger or counterattack rather than reflection.
I am therefore modifying, rather than abandoning, my original view. I still do not think one person can simply inflict shame upon another in the way that one might inflict an injury. The final psychological event occurs within the person who feels ashamed. It depends upon their own standards, history, sense of self and interpretation of what has happened.
Yet I had underestimated the interpersonal part of the process. Other people can provide the audience, the judgement and the threat to social standing that make shame possible. They can also act with the intention of producing shame. A group can do this collectively. Cultures can build whole systems around it.
Perhaps the most useful distinction for me is therefore between three things: an act that may be shaming, another person’s interpretation of that act, and the feeling of shame that may follow. These overlap, but they are not identical.
That distinction also guards against an awkward circular argument. If feeling ashamed were enough to prove that somebody else had shamed me, my emotional response would settle the moral question about their conduct. Yet the same public request might leave one person mildly embarrassed, another furious, another grateful for the reminder, and another untouched. My feeling deserves attention, but it cannot by itself tell me what another person intended or whether their conduct was unreasonable.
Perhaps this is where my original psychodynamic intuition still has value. When I feel shamed, one useful question is not only, “What has this person done to me?” but also, “What judgement about myself has their action awakened?” That does not excuse cruelty or public humiliation. It simply recognises that shame takes form at the meeting point between the social world and the internal one.
References
Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1930).
Scheff, T. J. (2000). Shame and the social bond: A sociological theory. Sociological Theory, 18(1), 84–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/0735-2751.00089
Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Mashek, D. J. (2007). Moral emotions and moral behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 345–372. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070145
Tracy, J. L., & Robins, R. W. (2004). Putting the self into self-conscious emotions: A theoretical model. Psychological Inquiry, 15(2), 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1502_01
