Responding to Freud: A Brief Sketch of Contemporary Shame Studies

Abstract

Responding to Freud: A Brief Sketch of Contemporary Shame Studies Wenwen Guo Two contrary tales Written in 1903 and opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in May 1905, George Bernard Shaw's four‐act drama Man and Superman features an intriguing conversation between Jack Tanner, Octavius Robinson, and Roebuck Ramsden early in act one, during which Tanner makes a passionate argument on shame. We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. Good Lord, my dear Ramsden, we are ashamed to walk, ashamed to ride in an omnibus, ashamed to hire a hansom instead of keeping a carriage, ashamed of keeping one horse instead of two and a groom‐gardener instead of a coachman and footman. The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. Why, you're ashamed to buy my book, ashamed to read it: the only thing you're not ashamed of is to judge me for it without having read it; and even that only means that you're ashamed to have heterodox opinions. To increase the power of his statement, Tanner prefaces his speech by admitting to be “the most impudent person,” who should be in the best position to “wholly conquer shame.” Usually taken as a comedy of manners, the play does offer a valuable insight into the turn‐of‐the‐century mentality in relation to shame. By Tanner's account, shame is pervasive and fundamental; it interferes with almost everything man does and can be triggered by matters as rudimentary as one's heritage and as trivial as a book purchase. Contained in his confession is a fascinating view that shame is directly correlative to respectability, which gestures at shame's proximity to social norms and collective values. Such contentions are usually made in regard to non‐Western societies and are only starting to appear in cross‐cultural psychological studies on shame in the late twentieth century. Contrary to Shaw's portrayal, when Peter Stearns presents his historicist overview of shame in Western Europe and in the United States, he understands the turn of the century as a part of what he calls a “period of reconsideration,” in which shame, an emotion that “had been ubiquitous at least since the advent of agriculture, as part of both social and personal experience, was now being downgraded, perhaps for the first time.” As a historian who specializes in world history, Stearns gathers major findings from sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and history to trace shame's evolution in Western societies from the pre‐modern to the contemporary era. Even as he mainly focuses on the United States, he does make sure that this reconsideration of shame applies to the Britons as well. Citing the diagrams generated by Google Books Ngram Viewer as support for his argument, Stearns points out a “fairly steady decline into the mid‐twentieth century” and “even beyond” in British shame references, starting from the late 1880s. By nature of modernity's effects upon traditional values and practices, the “pervasiveness of shame in premodern communities” has been replaced with a prolonged and serious reconsideration in modern societies starting from the early nineteenth century. How do we assess the divergent accounts of shame's presence in modernity across the disciplinary divides? My primary goal in the paper is to outline the differentiated responses to Freud in contemporary shame studies by way of accounting for the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Shaw's and Stearn's mapping of shame. Freud, I argue, is such a seminal figure for shame studies, despite a lack of direct contributions on his part when he was alive. Not only does he remain relevant to the contemporary scholarships on shame, but he has been crucial in generating continued interest among theorists and practitioners precisely because of his “originary” neglect. I also aim to point to the sociocultural context in the decades leading up to the turn of the twentieth century that witnessed a decided “turn” to shame. To some extent...