An ordeal of the real: shame and the superego

Jaco Barnard-Naudé

doi:10.18820/24150479/aa53i1.1

Abstract

This essay argues that the renovation of a discourse of shame in late capitalist society requires revisiting the conventional Freudian literature on shame from a Lacanian point of view. The argument holds that shame is a subjective manifestation of a complex dialectics between the ego-ideal and the superego. The essay extends the Lacanian notion that shame is felt in relation to an “Other prior to the Other”. Under the dialectical pressure of the ego-ideal, the superego, it is argued, plays a paradoxical but ineliminable role in the production of shame. In the concluding parts of the essay, I tease out the radical socio-political consequences of a renovated Lacanian discourse of shame. Correlated to the death drive, shame offers an escape from the capitalist symbolic order’s predeterminations and pre-assigned identifications. As such, shame is designated not only as the telos of psychoanalysis, but also as the original and originary ethical relation.

Highlights

The purpose of this article is to contribute – from a Lacanian point of view – to the renovation of a discourse of shame which, in our capitalist societies, has been in significant decline. “[T]here is no longer any shame”, Lacan (2007: 182) remarked in closing Seminar XVII in the atmosphere of May 1968
Following Lacan, I contest the reliance in the Freudian literature on either a conflation of the ego-ideal with the superego (Lewis 1971) or the assignation of shame exclusively to the ego-ideal (Piers 1953), or the recent consensus that shame is exclusively a superego emotion (Tangney 1994), by arguing that in the Lacanian analytic, shame should be understood as an ordeal of the Real which critically relies on a dialectics between ego-ideal and superego
While it is clear that the ego-ideal plays a critical role in the manifestation of shame, because it is a relation of tension with the gaze of the big Other, it is necessary to involve Lacan’s concept of the superego in order to understand the experiential quality of shame more fully

Summary

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to contribute – from a Lacanian point of view – to the renovation of a discourse of shame which, in our capitalist societies, has been in significant decline. “[T]here is no longer any shame”, Lacan (2007: 182) remarked in closing Seminar XVII in the atmosphere of May 1968. I am interested in the relationship between shame and two aspects of the Other, two ways in which the Other can appear to the subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis These are the (big) Other as ego-ideal and the Other as superego. Following Lacan, I contest the reliance in the Freudian literature on either a conflation of the ego-ideal with the superego (Lewis 1971) or the assignation of shame exclusively to the ego-ideal (Piers 1953), or the recent consensus that shame is exclusively a superego emotion (Tangney 1994), by arguing that in the Lacanian analytic, shame should be understood as an ordeal of the Real which critically relies on a dialectics between ego-ideal and superego.

Shame as an ordeal of the Real

Shame and the social order

Conclusion