In this paper shame is viewed from several different perspectives: culturally, socially and developmentally. As an emotion shame is shaped by culture and serves as a boundary for the protection of privacy; developmentally shame engenders the awareness of the self and its vulnerabilities. Recognition of shame proneness and defences against it can enhance the therapist's sensitivity and warn against the insensitivity and omnipotence that can often develop unwittingly.In this exploration of shame, I shall take a wide angle and first situate our psychoanalytic viewpoint in an historical and social context. For many valuable understandings come from other sources; and also within our own psychoanalytic domain there is a rich, varied harvest of knowledge to gather, some of which I shall present. First I shall address the experience of shame from a phenomenological and historical position.Bachelard calls human beings 'half-open creatures', acknowledging that a powerful human rhythm of movement is between openness and concealment, as we know from the constant cycle of sleep to wakefulness, which is movement from outwardness to inwardness. As we cover our bodies with clothing to protect and adapt ourselves to the ever-changing environment, so we also adapt to and protect ourselves from our outer and inner psychic environments, covering and uncovering ourselves, maintaining, as best we can, an equilibrium of safety and coherency in ever-changing social and personal worlds. The Indo-European root of our English word`shame' is from skem which is a word for cover. From this root we also derive words for structures that cover and protect us, for chambers and for cameras. Camera is a word for room, also given to a photographic apparatus, for the exposure of sensitive film to light must be done within a protective dark chamber. Was Freud a photographer? Might then he have paid more attention to the protective and concealing aspects of shame and used a camera as a model to complement the magic writing pad?For when unwelcomed and uninvited light floods the chamber of our minds, when we are subject both to harsh scrutiny, whether of memory or of an actual happening, we stand over-exposed, paralysed in the movement of our lives. The movement feels indelible, eternal, engraved in granite on our memories. Our protective coverings are rendered transparent, our psyches naked; and what is revealed is shameful, full of images of foulness, ugliness, incompetence; our thoughts stick out like Cyrano's or Pinocchio's noses but, unlike Cyrano, we mostly lack the wit and grace to turn our deficit to our advantages and thus gain our audience's applause. We stand humiliated and long to vanish, to sink into the protective ground, the mother earth with whom we may be reunited, thereby losing our painful self-consciousness, the painful awareness
