Shame

Shame is a depletion with a cause and a consequence, and the definition supplies all three. The experience is deanimation, which is loss of life from an animus rather than an unpleasant thought. The cause is being assigned guilt and internalizing the perception of oneself as the negative image, so it arrives from outside and is then adopted. The consequence is the one that makes it a trap, since shame inhibits the establishment of euphoric conduits or connection, which means it blocks the routes by which the depletion could be repaired. Marsh describes it in the plainest terms as punishment and as fear of shunning or the experience of being shunned. Its role in the wider machinery is to make the negative image position hold. Shame is what forces designated negative images to absorb the guilt of a society, it is inflicted through contempt and it is the mechanism of the contempt-shame symbiosis by which guilt is transferred downward. The visible signature is ordinary, since blushing and stammering increase in the presence of someone perceived as an endo-ideal. Two consequences she draws are worth keeping. Because prominence for a negative image produces shame rather than pride, members of a negative image work to hold each other back from achievement. And the diagnosis that psychopaths do not feel guilt fails to account for their recognized actions to deny, diminish and displace it, since a person who felt none would have no reason to bother.

Psychology distinguishes shame from guilt by whether the self or the act is condemned, following Helen Block Lewis and June Tangney, with shame generally found less adaptive and more associated with withdrawal and aggression. Silvan Tomkins built shame into affect theory as a fundamental affect, and Thomas Scheff argued that unacknowledged shame drives cycles of violence. Brene Brown's work popularized the distinction. Marsh's account matches the finding that shame produces withdrawal and supplies a mechanism for it, since a state that inhibits connection will produce exactly the isolation the research measures, and locates the origin in an assignment from outside rather than in an evaluation of the self.