Power and Shame: Reply to Mark Blechner and to Ruth Stein

Abstract

I touch briefly on my own experience of shame as triggered by what my discussants have written. I look at how shame and power interact in psychoanalytic discourse, examine their play in relation to questions of aggression and activity, and refer as well to what I am calling “an ethics of relativism.” Cautioning against uncritical binary thinking, I conclude that, if we forget the intimacy of good and bad, we are going to write jouissance, that site of extremity and transcendence where pain and pleasure are indistinguishable, right out of our sexual lives. And, if we do that, we are once again going to write sexuality out of psychoanalysis.