Shame Theory

Claude Eatherly, pilota e metereologo,
era un ragazzo texano di
27 anni quando ordinò lo sgancio
della prima bomba atomica della
storia, Little Boy, che colpì Hiroshima
il 6 agosto 1945.
Nonostante la giovane età, non
era certo un dilettante: per quella
missione vennero scelti i migliori
piloti della US Army, e Eatherly
aveva già dato prova del suo valore
militare, abbattendo, nel corso
della sua fulminante carriera,
più di trenta aerei nemici. Dopo
lo sgancio della bomba, tuttavia,
lasciò l’esercito e rifi utò qualsiasi
riconoscimento al valore da parte
degli Stati Uniti. Compì anche
maldestre rapine e altri piccoli
crimini, con la speranza di trovare
sollievo nel biasimo collettivo. Ma
ciò non bastò a placare i suoi dilanianti
sensi di colpa e Eatherly
venne internato in un ospedale
psichiatrico. Fu in questo momento,
quattordici anni dopo Hiroshima,
che iniziò un carteggio con
Günther Anders, il fi losofo tedesco
autore del capolavoro L’uomo
è antiquato. Il risultato è questo
libro: un commovente scambio
epistolare tra Anders e un’anima
persa, in cerca di un’espiazione
tanto impossibile quanto necessaria.
Dopo anni di assenza dalle
librerie, torna disponibile una delle
testimonianze più toccanti sul
disastro che cambiò per sempre
la coscienza collettiva.

This article has been mainly inspired by Tamara Shefer; Sally, R. Munt (2019) A feminist politics of shame: Shame and its contested possibilities
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0959353519839755

Questo articolo è stato fortemente inspirato da: Tamara Shefer; Sally, R. Munt (2019) A feminist politics of shame: Shame and its contested possibilities
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0959353519839755

The article investigates the ways in which Pirjo Honkasalo's documentary The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2004), examining the impact of the Russian-Chechen war on children, engenders a transnational audience through cinematic qualities, and most importantly through embodiment, producing a strongly affective resonance in the spectator. I argue that through a strategically affective approach to transnationality, the documentary establishes what I call a transnational shared space, shaped by a complex dialectics of sharing and non-sharing. My argument revolves around the concept of cinema as a shared space, referring to films that deliberately 'surround' the viewer rather than maintain a distance. As the analysis shows, Honkasalo's documentary pushes the spectator to reflect critically on transnationality and reconsider mass media-created memory of the military conflict. The article addresses issues underlying the film's ethical quest, such as whether this shared space involves both western (Catholic) and non-western (Orthodox and Muslim) audiences, and what the limits are of transnationalism in documentary film.

Contemporary political ethics has to face the question of how to repair relations which have broken down after crimes, oppression, and political violence. The book employs the work of European and feminist philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Albert Camus, Simone Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giorgio Agamben, Immanuel Kant, Jean Améry, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Margaret Urban Walker and Linda Radzik to engage with historical and recent cases: the post-liberation French purge, post-genocide Rwanda and post-colonial Australia and draws out the negative and positive conditions of ethical political responses in these contexts. It develops a philosophical account of ethical restoration through focusing on just punishment, guilt and shame, rebuilding political trust, forgiveness and reconciliation, remorse and atonement, and self-forgiveness.

This article examines Teresa of Avila's understanding of the relationship between spiritual dryness, intellectual frustration, and shame. It argues that Teresa presents these experiences as interconnected, as well as spiritually and intellectually valuable. This aspect of Teresa's thought provides important resources for theologians in the contemporary age in its insistence on the necessarily dynamic relationship between the spiritual and the intellectual in the life of the theologian. The article concludes with an examination of shame and its impact on theological developments in our time, as well as the possibilities for integrating shame productively.

Mathematics anxiety, a state of tension or apprehension when interacting with numbers and math, is the most widely studied emotional response to mathematics, and numerous studies have shown that it is an impediment to success in mathematics. However, this frame of anxiety limits our understanding of and ability to respond to the intense and sometimes debilitating emotions that surround mathematics for many people. Anxiety is an individual pathology, but our problems with mathematics are widespread, permeate our entire culture, and go well beyond individual issues. In this paper, I argue that shame plays a key role in mathematical difficulties. Looking at shame allows me to put mathematical difficulty in a relational context, and that in turn can lead to methods for preventing and addressing difficulties.

For this, I use a grounded theory approach to code and iteratively theorize about the written memories of negative mathematical experiences of adults. Literature relating to both shame and mathematical difficulties were also coded and connected with the memories. After several rounds of coding, I was able to categorize the memories into different storylines and I was able to identify broad categories of emotions and collect additional evidence for shame and other emotions. Evidence of shame appeared in all but one of the twenty-two memories, but only eight of the memories showed evidence of anxiety. My analysis results in a theory of how shame operates in and is perpetuated by school-based mathematical experiences, as well as how people respond to shaming experiences. Looking at these stories together allows us to move past individual anxiety and to see the collective causes and consequences of mathematical shame. This theory of mathematical shame may provide a new way for educators to understand and connect with their students which can lead to preventing and overcoming mathematical problems.

The practitioners of village stability operations operate nearly entirely in the spaces of communities damaged by combinations of traumatizing violence, loss, displacement, starvation, death and dismemberment. Their organization, equipping and training is focused on the most apparent physical security and developmental needs by those who fund and support their deployments and to a lesser extent on reparation of political dialogue as part of restorative justice and the reparative process. The psychological and sociological damage that these practitioners encounter however, often leads to frustration, overextension of personnel and resources and eventual failure. This paper explores the existence, nature and depth of psychological and sociological damage to communities traumatized by violent conflict. The purpose of this research is to establish a baseline of psychosocial-cultural intelligence on conflict societies that can be used to plan, prepare and execute peace operations and humanitarian missions. This psychosocial-cultural intelligence or understanding of traumatized communities provides peace operations and humanitarian missions with analysis and method to engage and influence traumatized communities to the point that they are able to provide for their self-sustainment without participation in communal violence. By exposing the pathology of sociological trauma at the family, village and tribal levels of structure, we can begin to unwind and resolve intractable conflicts in failing and failed societies despite limited time and resources of peace operations donors and practitioners.

Contents
The challenge of stabilizing villages and tribes in conflict ........................................................................... 3
Trauma and the family’s sociological structure ............................................................................................ 6
Village stability, trauma and the sociocentric family.................................................................................. 10
Internal identities and external locus of control in sociocentric families ............................................... 11
Communication and meaning in the sociocentric family ........................................................................ 14
The emotional logic of violence, shame, and trauma.................................................................................. 16
The rage of shame in sociocentric community ........................................................................................ 17
Psychological pathways to violence & suicidal terrorism ...................................................................... 21
Connecting failed states to traumatized communities ................................................................................. 22
Intractable cultural conflict: generational transmission of trauma .............................................................. 24
Crossing the trauma barrier - reestablishing meaning in traumatized communities ................................... 27
Relieving sociological trauma and rebuilding society ................................................................................ 31
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 33
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................... 35

This lecture addresses the social and political life of shame, deserved and undeserved, in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. This is used as a way into understanding some of our current political divides and their historical origins, and some of the psychological and intergroup understanding that is necessary to mitigate them. At the end, I  bring into focus a special way by which psychologists and psychoanalysts can become more proficient in metabolizing their own shame as a living model, and I will propose that  wealth shame, in particular, can be a generative pathway to doing so.

Is our affective capability that makes us "moral"? Are our moral acts necessarily due to some emotion? I deny that. We might have unemotive moral agents; just regulated by internal moral principles and decisions. Conversely, only a cognitive agent can be really moral and behave morally. It is the presupposed mind (with its specific motivational and doxastic representations) that makes a given act moral. Emotion can be there and activate or drive our moral conduct, but emotions too are due to cognitive evaluations and critical goals at staking. I present the "cognitive anatomy" necessary for some moral emotion: compassion/ pity; guilt with a victim; guilt for mere norm violation; moral shame. Moreover, moral emotions and conducts are not necessarily prosocial, benevolent, and helpful; based on empathy. Indignation, anger, impulse to punish or insult, desire of vengeance, etc. can be moral. I analyze the necessary cognitive structure for altruism and for hate; recognizing an act as "altruistic" is a "judgment on mere intent". I conclude with some remarks on the specific mental attitude required for a real "obedience" to moral or social norms; and why it is merely ideological and wrong that what is good and moral is in accordance with Nature, and vice-versa.

Agressie en geweld zijn van alle tijden. Ook inspanningen om agressie en geweld te beheersen, zijn er altijd al geweest. Aan die beheersing kan nog veel verbeterd worden. Het is dan wel noodzakelijk om het geweldmechanisme eens te bekijken vanuit een andere invalshoek dan tot nu toe gebruikelijk is. Die benadering begint met vragen naar hoe agressie eigenlijk ontstaat. Waar komen agressie en ge-weld vandaan? Wat voedt agressie en gewelddadig handelen? Waarom kunnen mensen hun agressie zo slecht beheersen?

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro’s writing. The collection illustrates how Munro’s short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro’s fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro’s fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.

Shame is one of the most stigmatized and stigmatizing of emotions. Often characterized as an emotion in which the subject holds a global, negative self-assessment, shame is typically understood to mark the subject as being inadequate in some way, and a sizable amount of work on shame focuses on its problematic or unhealthy aspects, effects, or consequences. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Shame reorients readers to a more balanced understanding of what shame is, as well as its value and social function. The contributors recognize shame as a complex, richly layered, conscious or unconscious phenomenon, and the collection offers an understanding of how theories of shame can help or hinder us in understanding ourselves, others, and the world around us. It also highlights how a diverse range of perspectives on shame can enlighten our understanding of both the positive and negative aspects of this powerful emotion. Edited by Cecilea Mun, these chapters by an international group of scholars reflect a broad range of methods, disciplinary perspectives, and both theoretical and practical concerns regarding shame. 
 
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498561372/Interdisciplinary-Perspectives-on-Shame-Methods-Theories-Norms-Cultures-and-Politics#

30% Discount Code: LEX30AUTH1

This article traces the evolution of the affect of pudore (a sense of modesty, restraint, and privacy) in the literary production of Primo Levi, with references to the works of other Italian Holocaust survivor-writers. Beyond the conventional typology of Holocaust survivors' shame and guilt, the article introduces the category of pudore as both an affect that pertains to concealing the body (through gestures and clothing) and a narrative technique that re-enacts such emotion by means of avoidance language (through reticence, euphemism , understatement, and irony). Because of its paradoxical nature as both an embodied affect and an affect that may conceal other emotions, pudore allows for a reassessment of the production and reception of testimonial literature in postwar Italy. Through an analysis of the tension between testimony and exposure, this article will show the relevance of the affective dimension of pudore in the works of Italian Holocaust survivor-writers.

Shame’s conceptualization is one of the most challenging discussions in psychological studies. This challenge creates many ambiguities for both psychologists and theologians in Eastern cultures especially Iranian-Islamic culture. This paper discusses the dominant psychological researches about shame and tries to compare the outcome of these researches with Abdulkarim Soroush’s theological-moral view about shame. This comparison, we believe, helps us to understand their different approaches for further psychological and theological studies. We used descriptive-analytical method for the current research and our resources were mostly psychological books, article and set of Soroush’s lectures. Also use the soroush books of Gods ethics for showing the soroush views in moral epistemology We conclude that although psychologists and theologians are talking about the same terminology, i.e. shame, they are coming from totally different planet in different paradigms with different philosophical-psychological assumptions. The different assumptions is showed for example about type of problem representation, innate view about shame, attention to ontological component of shame, truthful of shame, attention to virtue ethics of shame and methodology of investigation of concept and function of shame. This philosophical and psychological assumptions is discussed.

Schopnost zaujmout k sobě samému emočně pozitivní postoj ve chvílích, kdy zažíváme trápení, selhání nebo si uvědomujeme nějaký svůj nedostatek, je důležitým aspektem regulace emocí a zároveň i předpokladem duševního zdraví a duševní pohody. Takový postoj, označovaný jako soucit se sebou (angl. self-compassion), je zřejmě i významným elementem psychoterapeutické změny.
Příspěvek představí koncept soucitu se sebou, který se vedle všímavosti (angl. mindfulness) stal v posledních letech jedním z dalších elementů tradiční buddhistické psychologie, vzbuzujících zájem západních odborníků. Porovná tento u nás nový koncept s příbuznými psychologickými pojmy. Nastíní předpokládaný vliv nedostatku soucitu se sebou v etiopatogenezi některých psychických poruch a zmíní možnosti, jak tento postoj k sobě rozvíjet. Uvede i výzkumné aktivity týkající se soucitu se sebou, jež aktuálně probíhají v České republice.

In this paper, I explore the experience of shame and its connections to recognition and love as manifested in Shakespeare’s King Lear. My main focus in this paper is the ethical relevance of shame. I start from Sartre’s account of shame in Being and Nothingness, and I consider Webber’s attempt to reformulate it in terms of bad faith. I reject this and propose a way to rethink shame through a study of the workings of recognition in King Lear, following Stanley Cavell’s reading of this tragedy. I claim that the experience of shame has a relational structure, which makes it a crucial part of our ethical sensibilities. My analysis of King Lear brings out this structure and underlines the ethical significance of shame at this structural level, by highlighting its connection to recognition and love.

In this article, I explore the way that the creation and presentation of Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988) confronted the choreographer, performers, and audience with questions about the ethics of sex and romance and the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis. To analyze the complex affective relationships within and around the piece, I follow Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical theory of the face in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s related theory of faciality, which I interpret as referring to a disciplinary situation in which subjects are created through a process of terrorizing and shaming.

At a time when some modicum of formal gender equality has been won in many late-capitalist societies of the West, what explains the persistence of practices that extract labor and value from women and girls while granting a “surplus” of value to men and boys? Gendered shame is a central mechanism of the apparatus that secures the continued subordination of women across a number of class and race contexts in the mediatized, late-capitalist West. Focusing on the story of Amanda Todd, two forms of shame are distinguished. “Ubiquitous shame” is that shame that accrues to feminine existence as such, and is structured in relation to a futural temporality of redemption. “Unbounded shame” is a brute form of value-extraction that has found its ecological niche in social media—and destroys all futural aspirations.

In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel describes tragedy as a ‘collision’ between opposing notions of the good. Two moral paradigms, each internally consistent, yet each apparently incompatible with the other, struggle ‘to destroy one another in their mutual conflict.’ In Greek tragedy, these ‘two sides’ tend to be represented by a different characters: Antigone vs. Creon; Philoctetes vs. Odysseus; Orestes vs. the Eumenides.  Building on this basic concept of what tragedy is, but departing from Hegel’s sense of Shakespeare’s distinctiveness, I argue here that in Shakespeare’s tragedies, as in those of Seneca, the two sides of the ethical dilemma at the heart of the play’s interest tend to be presented, not as opposing characters, but instead within the psyche of a single individual: the so-called ‘tragic hero.’ They appear as contending moral paradigms, not necessarily each personified: rival imperatives, each grounded in a different emotional impulse. The tension between these two poles is most clearly expressed in the protagonist’s repeated, climactic soliloquies, which show him deciding between irreconcilable courses of action. Moreover, the two value-systems in question tend to be more or less the same across all four of the major tragedies: ‘pity’ vs. ‘ambition’; ‘kindness’ vs. ‘honour’; ‘mercy’ vs. ‘constancy.’ Over the course of their soliloquies, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear articulate and expose the incongruity Shakespeare discerns between Christianity and contemporary notions of honour: Christian compassion proves at odds with the desire to subjugate, dominate, and command.

This article postulates the "angry ethnic fag" as a figure of silenced queer of color dissent. Building on the work of artist Justin Chin, it explores how shame elucidates value economies that apprehend specific acts of indignity as having the currency to forward LGBTQ politics while rendering queer of color demands nonsensical. Efforts to recuperate shame often replicate consumption practices that feed on the racial other to nourish an unmarked queer body (politic). Wallowing in the rim of abjection, Chin's oeuvre centers the queer Asian/American to consider that which circulates around but is not necessarily in the bottom. His essay "Currency" and poem "Lick My Butt" theorize the (peri-) bottom as an ambivalent positioning that taints celebratory claims about the subversive potentiality of bottomhood. Reanimating shame and the erotic through a poetics of sweet pain, Chin's works show how "eating ass" opens up radical alternative relationalities for queer politics.

This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie’s shamed self-consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie’s self-consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre’s theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie’s evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But I’m here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie’s self-consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self-consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel’s emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame.

the changes in public and private spheres in the United States are not attributable solely to those who run the media, to reporters, to politicians, or to the public. The U.S. is experiencing a collaborative construction of a post-privacy era, a construction that is
responding to the new possibilities and difficulties of electronic media. Nevertheless, the future we are heading toward is not pre-ordained. It is not too late for Americans to educate themselves better about the dramatic shifts that are occurring and to debate their implications for the quality and texture of public and private life.

(C) 2002 Joshua Meyrowitz. All rights reserved (as noted in the final footnote, #42, on p. 204). Ignore Springer's illegal attempt to claim rights to this chapter.

The connection between shame, guilt and morality is the topic of many recent debates. A broad tendency consists in attributing a higher moral status and a greater moral relevance to guilt, a claim motivated by arguments that tap into various areas of morality and moral psychology. The Pro-social Argument has it that guilt is, contrary to shame, morally good since it promotes pro-social behaviour. Th ree other arguments claim that only guilt has the requisite connection to central moral concepts: the Responsibility Argument appeals to the ties between guilt and responsibility, the Autonomy Argument to the heteronomy of shame and the Social Argument to shame’s link with reputation. In this paper, we scrutinize these arguments and argue that they cannot support the conclusion that they try to establish. We conclude that a narrow focus on particular criteria and a misconception of shame and guilt has obscured the important roles shame plays in our moral lives.

Years ago when I was casting around for a dissertation topic, I chose to focus on shame and guilt, because these emotions were often linked in the literature (and merged and confused); but they did seem like different emotions to me. I began studying these emotions by interviewing people. ("Tell me about one time you felt ashamed.") (I've given you a few excerpts from two of these interviews as handouts that you can take with you.) Then I used various methods of qualitative analysis to identify the characteristic markers of shame vs. guilt. Subsequent studies involved statistical analysis and empirical validation of these characteristics (Lindsay-Hartz, 1995). Today, I am going to focus here on the clinical applications of these findings, rather than on the research per se. As I interviewed people, I quickly discovered that shame and guilt were quite different emotions. People did fairly easily talk about guilt. However, when the same people switched to talk about shame, they often had a hard time continuing the interviews. They needed more bathroom breaks. One interviewee told me about moving and giving no one his new address or phone number, in an attempt to hide following his experience of shame. People who had had good eye contact with me suddenly were looking down and avoiding eye contact with me. I thought, "What's going on here?" I began to feel-and see before my eyes-striking differences between these two emotions of shame and guilt-differences that also seemed important in terms of how any therapist or doctor might respond to these emotions in a therapeutic or even a medical context.  I am going to summarize some of these differences and move on to explore the whole shame field of emotions, including shame, humiliation, inferiority, and embarrassment.  I will also focus on relevant therapeutic interventions for working with patients experiencing these emotions in psychotherapy.

This paper considers the significance of racial shame for the constitution of the black subject and determines its implications for our reading of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. I will argue that the primary expression of black American experience and its determination within the narrow orbit of white narrative is the affective experience of shame. Implicated in the racialized metaphysics of power relations that dominates Ellison’s world, shame both foments the violence of internalized oppression and the violence of self-valorizing racial orthodoxy in black nationalisms. Departing from Foucault’s notion of subjectivization whereby agency is determined by the individualizing strategies of power, the paper, however, plots a different narrative of invisibility in Ellison’s novel that harbors emancipatory possibilities. The totalizing regimes of identification that articulate and structure our social existence will be shown to be effectively undermined by Ellison’s intervention in the racial imaginary, testifying to his ability to look beyond the blockages of his present and anticipate alternate forms of subjectivity that are yet to be realized in the constituencies of our history.

Shame is the most social of all emotions. It is also the most human. It seems that the experience of shame is the price we pay for being human. Shame involves self-criticism, with an individual’s perception of social impropriety and exposed inadequacy. Shame is a component of human value-systems and morality. It encourages individuals to respect social standards, and the boundaries of respected others. As social standards change so do the roots of shame. Robert Karen says: "Everywhere one looks (today) – dishonorable, indecent, and frightfully 'liberated' people openly violate the standards that shame once guarded." That which causes shame today may be quite different from the past.

Special Issue: "Gender & the Politics of Shame"

Volume 33, Issue 3, 2018

Guest Editor: Clara Fischer

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy seeks contributions for a special issue on “Gender and the Politics of Shame.” Significant advances in recent years in the development of shame theory make this issue especially timely.  The issue will evince  unprecedented feminist scholarly interest in affect and the politics of emotion. Shame has been theorized as a particularly gendered emotion, given women’s frequent inability to act as authors of shaming narratives in patriarchal societies. This special issue on the gendered politics of shame interrogates the relationship between gender, shame, and power. It examines how the politics of shame comes to be enacted against a variety of normatively transgressive bodies and subjectivities, and how shame informs the construction, inter alia, of gendered, racialized, and classed Others. Inversely, “Gender and the Politics of Shame” asks how Others respond to their construction as shameful. How have feminists subverted shaming narratives, or indeed, performed a politics of shame in the service of liberatory projects?

Just as shame itself is often contested as either a negative or productive experience, so the politics of shame may invoke a diversity of conceptualizations that conflict with each other. “Gender and the Politics of Shame” invites such competing and varied theorizations, and asks feminist scholars from philosophy, other disciplines, and those doing interdisciplinary work, to present new and promising ways of thinking about the gendered politics of shame.

This special issue has now been published here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15272001/2018/33/3

This study explores the impact of perceptions of shame on counselling in alcohol and other drug (AOD) settings. While some recent research points to the potential treatment barriers that result from discrimination against AOD clients by health care professionals, there is a dearth of research on the impact of shame and stigma on the work of allied health professionals, such as counselors and AOD workers. The qualitative data presented here are drawn from 17 in-depth interviews with counselors and AOD workers based in New South Wales, Australia. Counselors and other AOD workers perceive client shame as being compounded by the derogatory labels and stigmatisation often associated with problematic drug use. The article focuses on the professional tensions arising in managing stigma, alongside the alienating and isolating manifestations of shame, by exploring three themes: (1) the application of negative labels such as “addicts” and “junkies”; (2) the stigmatisation of AOD settings; and (3) the impact of labelling and stigmatisation on service provision. These findings point to the potential treatment barriers of stigma when counselling clients in AOD settings and highlight the fissures that can occur between colleagues when practice does not cohesively link with evolving knowledge around problematic drug use.

A central question of human psychology is whether and when people change for the better. Although it has long been assumed that emotion plays a central role in self-regulation, the role of specific emotions in motivating a desire for self-change has been largely ignored. We report 2 studies examining people’s lived experiences of self-conscious emotions, particularly shame, in motivating a desire for self-change. Study 1 revealed that when participants recalled experiences of shame, guilt, or embarrassment, shame—and, to some degree, guilt—predicted a motivation for self-change. Study 2 compared shame, guilt, and regret for events and found that although shame experiences often involved high levels of both regret and guilt, it was feelings of shame that uniquely predicted a desire for self-change, whereas regret predicted an interest in mentally undoing the past and repairing harm done. Implications for motivating behavior change are discussed.gree guilt predicted a motivation for self-change. Study 2 compared shame, guilt, and regret for events and found that although shame experiences often involved high levels of both regret and guilt, it was feelings of shame that uniquely predicted a desire for self-change, whereas regret predicted an interest in mentally undoing the past and repairing harm done. Implications for motivating behavior change are discussed.

Qualitative research dissertation in depth psychology.

Links between shame and art making have been felt, intuited, and examined but have not been sufficiently documented in depth psychological studies. This research explores the relationship between creating assemblage art and shame; effectively asking: can assemblage art help to re-assemble the self? The study surveys depth psychological conceptions of shame, art, and the role of creativity in healing; contemporary and historical shame ideologies, and recent psychobiological studies on shame; as well as assemblage art history and processes. This conceptual framework is attended by the researcher’s heuristic inquiry into shame and assemblage art making concluding with an interpretative phenomenological analysis. The participant study focuses on how participants negotiate the relationship between shame and art making in a workshop setting. Research data was primarily collected through pre- and post-workshop questionnaires designed to determine the participants’ prior shame experiences related to art making. The population consisted of eight participants: five females and three males between the ages of approximately 30 and 55. The participant study confirmed that for most of the participants shame is triggered when engaging with unfamiliar physical and psychic material in the art making process; however, despite negative self-evaluation, creating in a communal space was an overall positive experience. As demonstrated by the participant responses, it could be argued that healing did occur to a greater or lesser extent on a subjective per participant basis.

Turbulence is usually considered a negative property of an organization’s environment. Yet turbulence is also a feature of an organization’s internal dynamics and may be useful for productivity. This article argues that interactions between the formal and informal management of trouble produce relational turbulence that may mobilize resources and collective action, or conversely lead to dysfunction and crisis. The author links relational psychoanalytic theory with social constructionist perspectives in exploring intersubjective dynamics of trouble and its repercussions of turbulence. Based on a longitudinal interorganizational ethnography, an atypical mental healthcare organization is described – a democratic therapeutic community – in which turbulence plays a central function, but in two very different ways. In a restorative mode, turbulence generates formative spaces that are creative and have a regulating function, useful for organizational productivity. Conversely, a perverse mode is destructive and may produce intractable perverse spaces, leading to organizational dysfunction, crisis and even collapse. This is theorized by extending the psychoanalytic concept of liminal, transitional space. In contrast to the notion of transitional space as a safe, protective area, the author develops a model of distinct formative and perverse spaces created by relational turbulence in organizations. In human service organizations, where the generation, trading and management of trouble are inherent in an organization’s internal dynamics, turbulence may be a valuable resource, but one that, in the perverse mode, can be immensely destructive.