Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing (review)

Book Reviews Joseph Adamson & Hilary Clark, eds. Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing. Albany: SUNY P, Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture: 1999. Pp. xi + 280. Hardback $61.50. Paper, $21.95. Kierkegaard thought of shame as "a malfunction of the imagination" (46), and for Nietzsche "sparing someone shame" was "the most humane thing" (120). Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard stand out in nineteenth-century thought as profound questioners of unquestioned bourgeois culture . Masters of suspicion, they are also masters of the "unsocializcd," radically rooting out the unexamined and un thought through formative imperatives of Christian, European culture. Shame is, on the one hand, an inevitable component of universal education, an essential element in the forging of a national army and the sacramental glue holding together communal religious life and, on the other, a prime ingredient in every form of psycho-pathology—even the grandiose fantasies of the narcissist rest on a crippling bedrock of denied shame. The sting of shame's lash turns us into well-behaved citizens at the same time that it deprives us of our creativity and humanity, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche remind us. A paradox worth conjuring with certainly, but more importantly a paradox worthy of the attention of humane and creative writers, poets and novelists who may well see their own journey out of the clutches of shame as identical with the narrative of selfcreation . Nietzsche, in fact, thinks that the "greatest human beings perhaps also possess great virtues, but in that case also their opposites. I believe that it is precisely through the presence of opposites and the feelings they occasion that the great person, the bow with the great tension, develops" (The Will to Power). In other words, it might well be that the ability to contain the paradox , to be the carrier both of civilization and of its discontents, of social formation and of the inevitable damage shame and shaming do to the process of individuation—that this containing and narrating of shame frees us from the choice between slavish compliance and despotic deviance: both frustratingly rigid forms of un-life. In the collection of essays under consideration here, Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark bring together authors (both academics and clinicians) who explore the uneasy tension between, on the one hand, the fears and phobias of nakedness and, on the other, the lures of compulsive self-display as they manifest themselves in fiction (Hawthorne, Eliot, Faulkner, Lawrence, and Morrison), poetry (Anne Sexton), philosophy (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), and, finally, in an essay by Jeffrey Berman on that most fertile of shame gardens: the expository writing classroom. The chapters are shaped by their shared attention to the work of Silvan Tomkins (the research psychologist who developed a typology of the affects). By limiting their focus to Tomkins, the editors and the individual authors deprive readers of an opportunity to see the rich theoretical contexts that are now available for the exploration of shame. There are, for example, the archaeological and anthropological work of Eric Havelock and E.R. Dodds (oral background of the Homeric epics) and of Mary Douglas (on purity and profanity), and the philosophical inquiries of Bernard Williams into classical nuances of shame and guilt and there is finally the recent work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Shame and Her Sisters, an introduction to Tomkins's work). Readers interested in pursuing the subject of shame through different contexts will find these authors rewarding. The essays gathered for this collection fall into two categories: first, the essays that address nineteenth-century philosophical meanings of shame and, second, essays that identify manifestations of shame in the writings of specific authors. (The essay on pedagogy and the strategies for lessening the burden of shame in the classroom stands alone.) The first category is far richer than the second. Benjamin Kilbome in "The Disappearing Who: Kierkegaard, Shame, and the Self Vol. XXXIX, No. 4 161 L'Esprit Créateur locates the Hegelian roots of modern visions of shame. Self-consciousness is often only the recognition that one does not have a "beheld" self: "The self has been, as it were, murdered without a struggle and without a trace of there...