There are specific experiences that shatter the eggshell of the self and spill the yolk of the unconscious, slippery and fertile, aglow with potential for progress. Disgrace is one in all them — an expertise personal and highly effective, rife with probably the most elemental questions of who we’re and the place we belong. At its core is a peculiar type of inner conflict, by which one a part of the self gasps with revulsion on the decisions of one other, exposing the elemental incoherence of our internal lives and the eager for what D.H. Lawrence known as “living unison,” exposing the unsteady foundations of actuality itself.
The pioneering sociologist and thinker Helen Merrell Lynd (March 17, 1896–January 30, 1982) examines disgrace as a singular lens on the self, and on the human potential for integration and transformation, in her revelatory 1958 guide On Shame and the Search for Identity (public library) — an investigation of the disconnect between the individuals we expect ourselves to be and the individuals we act ourselves into being, inviting a correct understanding of disgrace as a pathway towards a extra acutely aware and coherent self.
Lynd writes:
Disgrace is an expertise that impacts and is affected by the entire self. This whole-self involvement is one in all its distinguishing traits and one which makes it a clue to identification… On this second of self-consciousness, the self stands revealed. Coming abruptly upon us, experiences of disgrace throw a flooding mild on what and who we’re and what the world we stay in is.
These experiences that contain the entire self are notably weak to our compulsion for classes and labels, born of an nervousness to include the within the finite the infinities of the thoughts, to wrest order from the chaos of the guts. With an eye fixed to the problem of comprehending and speaking such complicated experiences — experiences like love, surprise, longing, self-respect, and disgrace — Lynd cautions in opposition to the limiting nature of labels:
Reliance on accepted classes and strategies might imply that sure phenomena important for understanding identification escape consideration. Within the current local weather of psychological thought any noticed human attribute speedily acquires a label, which encases it inside one of many experimentalists’ or the clinicians’ classes. Intensive as these classes are, utilized to some life conditions they might be extra constricting than informing.
Sure pervasive experiences, not simply labeled, might slip by the classes altogether or, if given a location and a reputation, could also be circumscribed in such a approach that their important character is misplaced. Habituation to such utilization might blind us nonetheless additional to the need of looking extra deeply into the character of those experiences.
To look extra carefully at experiences “laborious to isolate and confine,” she argues, is to look into the very nature of the self, into what William James known as the “blooming buzzing confusion” of consciousness. Lynd writes:
It’s no accident that experiences of disgrace are known as self-consciousness. Such experiences are characteristically painful. They’re often taken as one thing to be hidden, dodged, coated up — even, or particularly, from oneself. Disgrace interrupts any unquestioning, unaware sense of oneself. However it’s doable that experiences of disgrace if confronted full within the face might throw an sudden mild on who one is and level the best way towards who one might turn into. Absolutely confronted, disgrace might turn into not primarily one thing to be coated, however a optimistic expertise of revelation.
A part of what makes disgrace so misunderstood and underinvestigated is that it’s usually conflated with guilt. Though the 2 might complement and reinforce each other, guilt tends to come up from the sensation of wrongdoing, of getting transgressed a boundary, whereas disgrace stems from the sensation of falling brief, of failing to achieve a hope or meet an expectation, which anchors it in a deeper stratum of the persona — for guidelines and limits are externally constructed, whereas our hopes, expectations, and beliefs are probably the most intimate constructing blocks of personhood. This is the reason an apology accepted and pardon granted can vanquish guilt, however they do little to allay disgrace. Lynd writes:
Guilt may be expiated. Disgrace, in need of a metamorphosis of the self, is retained. This transformation means, in Plato’s phrases, a turning of the entire soul towards the sunshine.
Drawing on a kaleidoscope of examples from literature — Shakespeare and Sartre, The Bible and Anna Karenina, Virginia Woolf’s diaries and Huckleberry Finn — she observes that disgrace is most frequently contrasted not with extrinsic measures like righteousness and approval by others however with the fundamental, intrinsic values of fact and honor. It’s a mirror held as much as the self, brutal and sobering — a revelation of a profound breach between the perfect self, by which our self-image is rooted, and the actual self. She writes:
Experiences of disgrace seem to embody the foundation that means of the phrase — to uncover, to show, to wound. They’re experiences of publicity, publicity of peculiarly delicate, intimate, weak features of the self. The publicity could also be to others however, whether or not others are or will not be concerned, it’s at all times… publicity to at least one’s personal eyes… Disgrace is the result not solely of exposing oneself to a different individual however of the publicity to oneself of elements of the self that one has not acknowledged and whose existence one is reluctant to confess.
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The sensation of unexpectedness marks one of many central contrasts between disgrace and guilt. This unexpectedness is greater than suddenness in time; it is usually an astonishment at seeing completely different elements of ourselves, acutely aware and unconscious, acknowledged and unacknowledged, abruptly coming collectively, and coming along with features of the world we have now not acknowledged. Patterns of occasions (internal and outer) of which we aren’t acutely aware come unexpectedly into relation with these of which we’re conscious.
This sense of inner incongruence is probably the most painful side of disgrace — a vivid reminder that we all know ourselves solely incompletely and have however marginal management over which parts of us take the reins of personhood at any given second. (And but this side of self-surprise is one thing disgrace shares with among the most lovely capacities of consciousness — surprise and delight, additionally marked by the gasp at one other dimension of actuality revealed. Homer linked Aidos — the Greek goddess of disgrace — to awe.) Lynd writes:
Being taken unawares is shameful when what’s abruptly uncovered is incongruous with, or manifestly inappropriate to, the state of affairs, or to our earlier picture of ourselves in it… Now we have acted on the idea of being one type of individual dwelling in a single type of environment, and unexpectedly, violently, we uncover that these assumptions are false. We had thought that we had been capable of see round sure conditions and, as a substitute, uncover in a second that it’s we who’re uncovered; alien individuals in an alien state of affairs can see round us.
What makes disgrace most insufferable is this sense of sudden expatriation from actuality, which leaves belief — in oneself, on the earth — dangerously jeopardized. Paradoxically, it’s usually not the darkest however the brightest in us that’s most weak to disgrace. Lynd writes:
A part of the problem in admitting disgrace to oneself arises from reluctance to acknowledge that one has constructed on false assumptions about what the world one lives in is and about the best way others will reply to oneself… Disgrace over a sudden uncovering of incongruity mounts when what’s uncovered is inappropriate optimistic expectation, glad and assured dedication to a world that proves to be alien or nonexistent… Much more than the uncovering of weak point or ineptness, publicity of misplaced confidence may be shameful — happiness, love, anticipation of a response that isn’t there, one thing personally momentous acquired as inconsequential. The higher the expectation, the extra acute the disgrace.
Disgrace is so troublesome to bear as a result of it takes us again to the core vulnerabilities of childhood, that tender want for congruence between the world of our creativeness and the actual world, the eager for a single world that coheres. Lynd writes:
Fundamental belief within the private and within the bodily world that surrounds him is the air that the kid should breathe if he’s to have roots for his personal sense of identification and for the associated sense of his place on the earth. As he steadily differentiates the world of in right here from the world of on the market he’s consistently testing the coherence, continuity, and dependability of each… Expectation and having expectation met are essential in growing a way of coherence on the earth and in oneself.
As a result of it’s so rooted in our grasp of actuality, the disgrace of getting misjudged a state of affairs, misplaced an expectation, miscalculated one’s personal deserves, is a profound unmooring of the psyche:
What we have now thought we may depend on in ourselves, and what we have now regarded as the boundaries and contours of the world, prove abruptly to not be the “actual” outlines of ourselves or of the world, or those who others settle for. Now we have turn into strangers in a world the place we thought we had been at dwelling. We expertise nervousness in turning into conscious that we can not belief our solutions to the questions Who am I? The place do I belong?
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As a result of persona is rooted in unconscious and unquestioned belief in a single’s instant world, experiences that shake trusted anticipations and provides rise to doubt could also be of lasting significance… Shattering of belief within the dependability of 1’s instant world means lack of belief in different individuals, who’re the transmitters and interpreters of that world. Now we have relied on the image of the world they’ve given us and it has proved mistaken; we have now turned for response in what we thought was a relation of mutuality and have discovered our expectation misinterpreted or distorted; we have now opened ourselves in anticipation of a response that was not forthcoming. With each recurrent violation of belief we turn into once more youngsters not sure of ourselves in an alien world.
Within the the rest of On Shame and the Search for Identity, Lynd goes on to discover examples of disgrace and its conciliation throughout the canon of Western literature, then examines the 2 natures of disgrace, what it affords in confronting the tragedy of life, and methods to suppose from elements to wholes. Couple it with Lynd’s up to date Karen Horney on the conciliation of our inner conflicts, then revisit Ellen Bass’s magnificent poem “How to Apologize.”
