The Breadth and Boundaries of a Self-Psychological Immersion in Shame: a One-And-A-Half-Person Perspective Andrew P

The Breadth and Boundaries of a Self-Psychological Immersion in Shame: A One-and-a-Half-Person Perspective Andrew P. Morrison, M.D.

Shame colors other feelings and perceptions about the self. From reflections about his own personal experiences and observations regarding a particular manic-depressive patient, the author discusses the evolution of his current clinical and theoretical understanding of shame. The framework of analytic self psychology is offered as a particularly useful perspective from which to consider shame, with its emphasis on the concept of selfobjectto account both for shame's development (through selfobject misattunement and unresponsiveness) and for its amelioration (through empathic mirroring, idealization, and twinning). A developmental sequence for shame is advanced reflecting limitations in selfobject responsiveness, and problems are noted in the ability of current self psychology theory to fully account for the alleviation of shaem. The self plays its part in theconstruction of those selfobjects needed to ease shame, representing the “one-and-a-half-person psychology” of the paper's subtitle. Finally, the important role of countertransference shame is considered through a clinical example of therapist disclosure of his own shame to his patient, utilized in order to repair an interrupted kinship selfobject transference.

Of human emotions and affects, shame settles in like a dense fog, obscuring everything else, imposing only its own shapeless, substanceless impressions. It becomes impossible to establish bearings or to orient oneself in relation to the broader landscape. Like fog, shame distorts vision and influences what is seen. But more.Shame also feels like a weight, a heaviness, a burden, pressing down often at the top of the back, forcing the body into the characteristic posture that Tomkins (1962-1963) described— shoulders hunched, the body curved forward, head down, and eyes averted. The burden of shame can settle into different parts of the body—the pit of the stomach, the face or eyes, or externally, an aura encasing the entire self.Shame induces a wish to become invisible, unseen, to sink into the ground or to disappear into the thick, soupy fog that we have just imagined. I first became aware of shame in my own musings about myself as a young boy and early adolescent. I did not have words for it then. Few others did either, forshame was not really part of the psychoanalytic lexicon in those days. (Kohut, 1977, has referred appropriately to “nameless shame,” p. 241.) I ruminated about ways that I was not “good enough” (or strong or smart or boy/man enough); ways that I had failed (to get a base hit, to make honor society, to “score” with a girl); personal flaws or defects (too skinny; Jewish, not Christian; physiognomy or anatomy not crafted the way it “should” be); friends who were too few or somehow deficient. There was nowhere to go with these concerns. My parents gave me pep talks about how terrific I was, but somehow these did not seem to do the job. I will not detail developmental selfobject misattunements and insufficiencies as I subsequently came to understand them from a self-psychological perspective, but I continued to feel my own inadequacies—in what I now understand to have been a shame-saturated depression—with only the fleeting wisp of a clear, blue sky lying beyond the fog, suggesting the possibility that the fog might someday lift. I lived many of those latency-aged and early adolescent days in a fantasied future world of how things might turn out—a good college, women, success. These would somehow show that I was really all right. I then happened into a situation that turned my life around and provided a way to set aside the burden, to deal effectively with some of my shame. I discovered a camp—coed, called a “work camp” in those days; interracial, politically radical and active, creatively teeming with shops where you could draw, write, print, or saw anything, where Pete Seeger or his friends led us in anticapitalist songs like “The Banks Are Made of Marble” or songs from the Lincoln Brigade. I became actively involved in writing and drama; we had a writing group, and our counselor—a whimsical man with a corncob pipe and a Greek sailor's cap—read to us from a typescript of a new book by a buddy of his. In this way I first heard parts of Catcher in the Rye. I participated recently in the camp's 50th anniversary and a simultaneous celebration of the 90th birthday of its (still vigorous) founder and director (who was not incidental to my professional future and in my shame resolution, since he was a Viennese psychologist who generated widespread paternal warmth and idealization). At this place were kids and grown-ups with values and interests—ideals, as I would call them now— similar to my own. I developed intense friendships, which I had not been able to establish in the suburban town where I lived during the rest of the year. I learned that my style of quiet listening was not necessarily weired as it had seemed back home but that it garnered support, affirmation, and even a lovely girlfriend. Here I first heard the perfect majesty of Beethoven's Seventh while sitting in the bunk with an older counselor-in-training named Mike and his girlfriend Diane, who told me about the psychology she was studying in college. Sounded pretty intriguing to me. From my experiences during those summers, I got the affirmation, appreciation, and, at times, even the admiration that had felt so distant in my earlier experiences (selfobject and otherwise). I returned to my home each fall progressively strengthened, feeling more competent, more sure, convinced that there was a world of “others” with whom I fitted, where I belonged. Better able, then, to greet the conventional, critical ambience of my hometown with some irony and wit, to plumb it for the (considerable, as it turned out) benefits and advantages that my parents assured me were there, and to know that I would indeed be able to choose life goals, partner(s), and environments with some conviction of finding satisfaction. I learned from this crucial experience, then, that fundamentally I was all right, that there was reason for me to find myself acceptable, and that others were there to affirm that assumption. I had not planned, when I started to write this paper, to go on about my own experience or to share reminiscences about that most important place in my young life. I recognized, as I found words initially to begin to describe my shame experience, that I was in danger of revealing to you, the reader and my professional peer, some of my most tender memories and vulnerabilities. (While the feelings about ourselves that generate shame can be altered through life's adventures and through good treatment, the memories of shame remain always the most sharply etched.) Exposure of shame-infused feelings is likely to stimulate recurrent shame—I began to feel self-conscious, wondered whether I wanted to make myself vulnerable, to open myself in this way to public observation and critiques. But then I reminded myself of the challenge we face through the inevitable specter raised of our own shame experiences as we treat our patients' shame. How better to address this challenge, I thought, than through (measured) exposure of my own shame. My own professional interest in shame emerged as I found words to articulate my own shame and discovered an antidote to it, a lifting of the fog with glimpses of the blue beyond. As part of that process I had gone to medical school and had an “OK” analysis, which dealt well enough with the oedipal, competitive concerns and fears of retaliation, but that analyst did not seem to recognize or resonate particularly well with the significant remnants of my vulnerabilities and self-doubt that still remained relatively concealed. During my psychiatric residency and subsequent analytic training I encountered no particular interest in, or sensitivity to, the study ofshame. One of my esteemed teachers responded to my interest, for instance, with something like, “Well, that's OK, Andy. It's interesting stuff, but shame is rather superficial, don't you think? Social; not internal, riveting, like our conflicts surrounding guilt.” But, also, as part of my personal interest, I discovered the turbulence and torments of a manic-depressive man, my own age, who had once planned to become a professional musician. Slightly later, I discovered Kohut and self psychology. My patient, an industrial lab scientist who was the eldest child of professional musicians, was designated within his family to become a performer. At 12, he played solo with the Boston Pops, but, as he told me, “It's been downhill ever since.” Restrictions were placed on his choice of playmates to be sure that his friends were worthy of him. His mother was his music teacher, but he soon discovered that nothing he did was up to her standards of perfection. When he was in college, his fatherhad a long talk with him, suggesting that he go into science, which would offer him greater security; implicitly, his father's message was that he did not “have it” as a musician. Immediately after college, he married a girlfriend and entered industry as a lab technician, where he has been ever since. Alternating with bouts of despair and depression, my patient became manic, thinking that he was a great scientist, feeling free to spend money and to have extramarital affairs and to do whatever he wanted. Interestingly, each manic episode was ushered in by his getting up very early and playing forcefully on the piano (which he had stopped playing several years earlier). He came as a patient severely depressed, following a manic episode after which his wife left him, taking with her their child. In his depression, I learned about his profound sense of failure, his expectations that he had been destined to be great without having to work particularly hard for it, and his vulnerability to disappointments when things did not work out the way he expected. The final blow was, of course, his wife's “defection,” leaving him feeling vulnerable and unworthy. How could it be that life was working out this way—not a world-class musician, abandoned by a wife on whom he had depended for strength and admiration, working in a menial job that paid less than he thought he was worth and that he found profoundly boring? In his depression he had no energy, no vitality, no interest in external matters. From this man—call him Manfred—I learned about narcissistic vulnerability, defensive mania in response, and the strata of shame that underlay both (Morrison, 1989, pp. 166-178). I personally came to Kohut and self psychology from this quest to understand more about shame. Since shame is about the whole self (H. Lewis, 1971) and Kohut's interest was in the self's experience and the emergence of its selfobject needs, self psychology seemed most relevant and helpful in providing a framework forshame. In Kohut's elaboration of the idealized selfobject, I found articulation of my impressions of the relationship of shame to failure to attain attention and ideals, including Manfred's ideal of achieving acceptance by his idealized parents through fame as a concert pianist. It was apparent that my patient's own idealized parentalimago—his father—had turned away from him (to alcoholism, to work, thus disallowing his son to share in his own musicianship). Kohut's assertion of the legitimacy of narcissistic needs and the age-appropriate expectation for the approving gleam in the parental eye—so clearly missing in Manfred's descriptions of his mother's scornful look during music lessons—lent support to our working toward the goal of acceptance and understanding. This contrasted with the experience-distant, confrontational perspective on his “narcissistic entitlement,” which dominated the psychoanalytic approach to narcissism at that time. In addition, Kohut (1971), more than any other theorist, spoke explicitly about shame. Primarily, he saw shame as the response of the self overwhelmed by unintegrated grandiosity—the overflow of grandiosity within the “vertical split” (p. 181n)—but also as the reaction of a self buffeted or ignored by nonattuned, understimulating, and inadequately responsive selfobjects. Self psychology, then, fitted my clinical experiences and observations about Manfred and, by that time, the many other patients for whom I believed shame to play a seminal part. With this background on my own odyssey regarding shame and the two clinical examples of Manfred and myself as background, I turn to a more formal exposition of how I think shame operates and develops. In this, I try to give full vent to an understanding informed by evolutions in self psychology following Kohut's writings in the 1970s. I offer a tentative scaffolding for a developmental line of shame, as well as some thoughts about countertransference in work with shame, each from within my own particular vision of self psychology. This vision includes an understanding of the selfobject construct as constituting an affirming experience of the self(Lichtenberg, 1991), but an experience usually provided by an attuned caregiver/other. I also try to highlight some potential areas of controversy (implicit in the subtitle of this paper referring to a one-and-a-half-person psychology) and perhaps some boundary issues where the challenges of shame may carry us beyond whereself psychology has thus far been inclined to go. Shame is, I believe, one of our principal responses to selfobject misattunement and nonresponsiveness confounding the expectations of the self ready for, or hoping to receive, affirmation and mirroring, acceptance by, and participation with, the idealized selfobject, or shared humanity and alikeness with the alter ego (twinship)selfobject. When this anticipated or hoped for response is not forthcoming, we experience abrupt confusion and deflation, recoiling inward and pulling back, withdrawing from the offending selfobject environment. This deflation and withdrawal are what Tomkins (1962-1963) has described regarding the facially downcast features of even the newborn infant whose pleasure-joy or interest-excitement is suddenly interrupted. Kohut (1971) spoke of this interruption in terms of the “unexpected non-cooperation” of the mirroring selfobject, as when selfobject disapproval generates the feeling of overwhelming grandiosity and shame in the vertical split. In an interesting paper on shame and superego development, Schore (1991) offers a model in which the developing toddler, in a “grandiose, narcissistically-charged state of heightened arousal” turns expectantly to her selfobject/caregiver for approval or response. When she receives instead a scolding stare or a bored turn of the head (i.e., misattunement or selfobject failure), there is a sudden “shock-induced deflation,” which is paradigmatic of that self-selfobject interaction that generatesshame. Implicit in this perspective are the function of selfobject responsiveness in helping the infant to attain affect regulation (Socarides and Stolorow, 1984-1985) and the response of shame from selfobject failure to provide smooth regulatory functions. In my own previous writings on shame I have presented a similar perspective to Schore's, with the suggestion that shame is most closely related to depletion anddepletion anxiety in the disorders of the self, although anxiety about fragmentation is also pertinent. The model for shame that I propose suggests that severe shamesensitivity develops particularly for those whose selfobjects have been fundamentally misattuned and inadequately responsive to needs and expectations, particularly for help in affect regulation. Under these circumstances, the child, who yearns to have his specialness and uniqueness affirmed by well-attuned and devoted selfobjects, learns instead that he is not unique or worthy of attention and develops a readiness to feel unworthy, inferior, or in some way flawed—the affective stamps composing the language of shame. For a child burdened with relatively nonresponsive selfobjects, the very recognition of need and yearning comes itself to stimulate shame, in that the child has learned that his selfobjects will not respond to his needs. He is cast back to assumptions of his own unworthiness to make sense out of the parental unrelatedness or disparagement and to protect his idealized view of his parents. Elsewhere (Morrison, 1989), I have referred to the tension between the expansive(energized, exhibitionistic, grandiose) and contracted (depleted, small, insignificant) poles/experiences of the self as the Dialectic of Narcissism, with shame playing a central role in each pole, depending on the nature and quality of the responding selfobject environment. To illustrate, let us return to Manfred and the model scene that he described in his piano lesson with his mother. We might assume that the anger and ambivalence that he experienced from her as a little boy also obtained earlier during his infancy. Here as earlier, she expressed her expectation that he would evolve as a pianist with immense talent. He was primed to proceed and achieve what was so readily communicated to him, but as he practiced and presented himself for his lesson, he received scowls, criticisms, perhaps even ridicule instead of the hearty and empowering pleasurable response that he hoped for. He was failing in his aspirations and expectations and was receiving abrupt disconfirmation of those abilities that he had been promised and had come to expect as part of his birthright. Thus, what should have been, was not; instead of love and approval—a gleam—he observed scorn. With this disapproval came a jolt for Manfred, a turning in and away, a hiding in shame. After giving up his pursuit of music (except for the periods of incipient manic frenzy), which followed his disappointments in gaining affirmation from his previously adoring parents and his loss of the stabilizing wife who had provided some mirroringstructure in his otherwise bleak existence, he turned to alcohol and manic flight. These were attempts to manage what we realized together was his overwhelming sense of shame and failure. So, for Manfred the developmental line for shame began with inconsistently responsive parents/selfobjects, whose occasional adoration of him seemed more to meet their own narcissistic needs for an especially gifted extension of their vulnerable selves but who were unable, more routinely, to respond meaningfully when he turned to them for attention and love. The varieties of selfobject misattunements that Manfred experienced instilled in his evolving self the tendency toward, and sensitivity for, shame, which I have described. While his awareness of differentiated shame had to await further cognitive development, I suggest that vulnerability to extensive shame begins, as described by Tomkins and supported by other observers of mother-infant interaction, with the relational milieu of the newborn. Frominfancy onward, when the mother turns away from her daughter's playful giggle or the father scoffs as his daughter reaches out to be held, the scaffolding is in place for further evolution of shame at the awareness of need and yearning. Michael Lewis (1992) maintains that shame does not exist until it can be cognitively experienced— a position very different from the developmental perspective that I have just suggested. I do agree, however, that the emergence of self-consciousness, or what Broucek (1991) refers to as objective self- awareness, must begin before the delineated experience of shame can occur. At this point, at around 12 to 18 months, the developing self begins to differentiate, perhaps disengage from an impression of union with its selfobjects, and then we start to experience as shame selfobject nonattunement and disconfirmation of expectations. With self-awareness also comes the potential for awareness of a nonresponsive “other” and hence for registration as alien when the selfobject does not respond as expected to the self's actions or needs. This sense of alienness and shame becomes potentially accentuated with the development of the capacities for walking and forspeech, especially when the selfobject fails to affirm the validity and worthiness of these newly formed capacities. To the extent that a toddler feels that she does not embody those qualities that please or are affirmed by the selfobject, she believes that there is something wrong with her self. In feeling objectified and nonaffirmed, the self seems starkly alone, separate from the selfobject, in a matrix of strangers rather than within the familiar context of similar, alter ego (twinship) selfobjects. With the isolation and alienation of objectification, of rupture in the smooth context of a self-selfobject bond, come depression and despair, as well as those feelings of difference, flaw, insignificance, unworthiness, patheticness and ridiculousness that constitute those experiences that define the language of shame. Objectification, too, further leads to recognition of the “other,” the stranger who is nonempathic, nonresponsive, the not-selfobject whose very nonresponsiveness generates shame. With this developmental step come inevitable comparison and competition with others, as well as the beginning capacity for the formation of what M. Lewis (1992) calls standards, rules, and goals, but what I tend to think of—more psychoanalytically and less cognitively—as ideals. We create/construct an image of an ideal self, a sense of perfection and worthiness after which we strive, and begin to establish criteria of failure and shortcoming that become the internal criteria for shame. Following objective self-awareness in the development of the self and the experience of shame— itself a product of failed empathic responsiveness on the part of the selfobject—comes an evolving capacity for symbolization and imagination, or, specifically, for formation of ideals and images of an ideal self. Traumatizing or repeated selfobject failure leads to the formation of rigid, inflexible ideals and repeated experiences of failure to achieve them, causing shame. On the other hand, when parents respond with enthusiasm and joy to their child's presence and actions, ideals tend to take on a more fluid, free, and whimsical quality, allowing for potential attainment, personal growth, and feelings of competence and pride. The inevitable shame experiences of those of us fortunate enough to have grown up with responsive, affirming selfobjects tend to be circumscribed, manageable, and of relatively limited duration. With the capacity for imagination and creativity in the construction of ideals we can begin to take control over the generation of shame. We become able to define the source of shame as emanating from within our own judgments about ourselves in contrast with that deriving from actual feedback from our selfobject environment. Our selves are shaped by the nature of selfobject experiences (through the transmuting internalizations of Kohut), but at some point we also begin to take over and firm up our own self experience. For example, when I think of my own earliest camp experience, I recall a child tearfully homesick; insecure and teased about my own limited athletic abilities; dissatisfied with the nature of friendships within the bunk. I was, as I reflect on it now, the interactive product of parents who were inconsistent in their selfobjectattunement and rather stereotyped and inflexible in the ideals/expectations of the kind of son they anticipated (including “banishment” to camp at too early an age). The selfobjects of suburbia seemed to furnish similar standards and ideals, which felt alien to me but which I accepted as valid and led to deep shame and despair. After the work camp that I described earlier, a whole new set of selfobjects and selfobject experiences obtained. I felt affirmed in my literary and creative interests, in my developing qualities as a “listener,” and in the particular attributes of my physique, my “looks,” and my dress. The selfobject matrix had shifted and recombined; in that camp, I found the existence of flexible, affirming selfobjects that fostered growth and self-confidence. With that experience, my inner self-vision became more positive and accepting, less shame-infused. Positive selfobjects and selfobject experiences, then, influenced and supported the growth and expansion of a self—in this instance, my own—during (as late as)adolescence. With this affirmation of a potentially flexible and affirmable ideal, I gained in self-confidence, and shame receded. But equally significant developmentally, in addition to input from contemporary selfobjects, are the stability, cohesion, and firmness of self that emerge as selfobject qualities and functions are borrowed and taken over. From this base of strength, the newly mobilized (or partially evolved) self becomes a center, not only of impressions and initiative but also of imagination, of creativity (like the wisps of blue that I had imagined to lie beyond the fog). In the present consideration of shame from a self-psychological perspective, I think at this point that I may rub up against, abrade with, the boundaries dictated by its theory. I wish to suggest that the self is not solely the recipient of the responses of its selfobjects but, after a time of being shaped by the selfobject environment, becomes as well the creator, the constructor, the imaginer of those selfobjects generated to meet particular self needs. These are components of what has been called “resiliency”—a fascinating subject that goes beyond the scope of this paper. Thus, I believe that in interacting with our selfobjects, we in part receive their responses, in part shape them through our imaginings, our fantasies. Our intersubjective interchanges are not exclusively the overlapping spheres of our respective internal universes; our perceptions of selfobjects also include images, idealized entities, generated in part to meet those needs that sustain the vitality of our selves. For me in adolescence, the work camp—even its representation—was a selfobject, providing significant functions that validated my growth. But so, too, did I play a part in constructing the image of that healing antidote to shame, that selfobject experience described by Lichtenberg (1991) and Wolf (1988), the fantasy selfobject outlined by Bacal and Newman (1990).1A recent visit to the camp on the occasion of a 50th birthday/reunion, coming 39 years after my last year as counselor-in-training, reminded me whimsically that the place, though still quite splendid, was not vast—the shops were, in fact, rather small, the theater somewhat moth-eaten, the director a bit remote and verbose. No matter that the camp had grown and flowered in my mind's eye; it had served its function as antidote to my shame quite admirably, albeit, as I am trying to suggest, to some degree through my own creation. Creativity itself consists in part, I believe, in the external articulation and reshaping of aspects of our particular idealized selfobjects. We participate in generating our selfobjects through that healthy, solid core of self that scans the environment to identify potential sources of selfobject sustenance and that contributes to their shapes and structures through its own creative embellishments. How this works or when it fails must be considered elsewhere. From this personally defined intersubjective view, a firm self nucleus, in interaction with a delineated other, in part creatively imbues that other with qualities and attributes that assist that person, experience, or place to meet the self's needs. In the present context, we create those attributes of another (e.g., warmth, affirmation) or creatively seek out and find helpful others to assist in dispelling shame, disgrace, and despair. With this creative act in mind I speak in my subtitle of a one-and- a-half-person psychology, with only one part of the other consisting of the environmental, provided selfobject, the other part consisting of those qualities created for, or attributed to, her, him, or it at the self's initiative. One—the self; one-half—the environmental “other,” the rest of that other shaped by the perceiving —————————————

1 The work of Hoffman (1983) elaborates an interactive, mutually constructed reality (social constructivism), which bears some resemblance to this view of the created selfobject. self.2 I have in mind a figure-ground relationship between those objectively (socially) given, reponsive attributes of an environmental selfobject and those attributes subjectively generated from within—created, constructed— to meet our selfobject needs. I want to turn now to therapeutic work on shame with our patients, particularly since it appears so plentifully in transferences and countertransferences, selfobjectand otherwise. Transference shame is one of the most readily identified of the painful emotions and causes of resistance and therapeutic impasse encountered in clinical work. So, too, that shame generated and experienced in the countertransference can be a tip-off to our patient's feelings of failure or unworthiness or alternatively can be pushed away by the therapist who wants to avoid considering his or her own convictions of inadequacy. Often, the vehicle of transference shame will be empathic (selfobject) failure experienced from the therapist, inviting resolution through accepting, helping to articulate, and understanding the shame-evoking situation. Shamewithin the transference can be expressed directly or derivatively (through the language of shame alluded to earlier) or through one of the several defenses againstshame, including secretive withdrawal, anger/rage, contempt, envy, or depression. It has been my observation that the expression of narcissistic rage, as described by Kohut, is most frequently triggered by feelings of shame within the self, with the rage aimed at annihilating the “offending” selfobject who is experienced as the causeof shame. Lansky (1992) has implied a similar perspective in his considerations of the relationship of shame to violence in family systems and in the broader society. Countertransference shame is one of the more difficult experiences with which we must deal in our clinical work, for we face those very feelings of inferiority, ineptitude, and deficit that so much of our professional training has been aimed at eliminating. We are confronted with silences that beg for response and accusations that we are useless and incompetent in meeting their needs by people we are trying to understand and help, and we are overtaken by boredom, fatigue, or sexual excitement when we are supposed to be energized or containing. We may run from the shame experience by blaming the patient for being defensive or for “inducing” feelings in us; by tuning out and missing our own distress or that of our patient; or by tacitly colluding in agreeing to “bypass” our mutual shame feelins (H. Lewis, 1971) and to focus on something else, like anger or conflict. Alternatively, we can attempt to stay with our own shame and learn from it (both about ourselves and about our patients' particular experiences). Without resorting to blame or to notions of “induction” of feelings in us by our patients, I suggest that we as therapists can attend to feelings of shame that arise in us as we interact with our patients' experiences, potentially leading to empathic resonance with, and clarification of, their feelings of shame and the various “failures” that generate them. These countertransference feelings (true, as well, for anger, anxiety, and despair) can be understood from perspectives of affect resonance, role responsiveness, and selfobject attunement, as well as through attention to our inability to meet those creative constructions and imaginings of self-object attributes desired from us by our patients (Bacal's fantasy selfobject). I will try to illustrate some of these themes of transference and countertransference shame from a prototypical interaction in my once-weekly psychotherapy with Manfred. He derived considerable comfort from assumed (and in part validated) twinship elements in our relationship, including the near identity of our ages, my interest in music which had “seeped out” over the years, and so on. On this particular occasion, however, he was focusing on differences between us in his supposition of my professional success, and he was quite bitter and open in expressing resentment and envy. Manfred began the session with a long silence. When I ultimately asked him what he was feeling, he murmured, “Oh, nothing…. I was just thinking about how boring my work is. It's really the pits—I can't work up any enthusiasm for it.” This was a familiar theme, and I commented on how routine his job always seemed to feel. After a pause, I said, “Very different from the way things were supposed to turn out, right? I'm thinking, of course, about all the years at the piano, and yourmother's expectation that you were supposed to be great.” He shifted uncomfortably and said, “Yeah, sure,” but then with a flash: “So what? We've covered all this before. What good does it do to talk about what was supposed to have been? I mean, you can't do anything about that—you can't make me a better pianist; you can't make me like my lab job any better.” Then, with some irony: “In fact, I'm not sure there's much you can do, or that you do much that's particularly useful!” While there were many ways I might have approached his anger, on this occasion I wondered to myself whether, indeed, I had been able to provide anything of much use to Manfred. I considered the drabness of his life—his small apartment; his drinking; his fantasies and jealousy about the gratifications and worthiness of my own work; my “twinship” identification with how bored I would feel carrying out other people's lab experiments that did not move toward anything particularly important. At such a moment I might well have doubted my own clinical skills, felt my own drabness with him, my own limitations to provide energy and excitement. My own mind might well have wandered to other, outside matters, or my eyes to the clock as I braced for the many minutes left in this session. Catching myself doing so, I might have felt that this was “bad,” that there was “something wrong” with me as Manfred's therapist for being so diverted from my task. “It sounds like you were pissed at me for bringing you back to what hadn't worked out, like it felt that I had missed a cue about how badly you were feeling now, in your work.” He looked at me with a smirk and said, “Easy for you to talk about dreams which don't turn out right; you, the comfy shrink who's got it „made.‟ I assume you like what you're doing— right? And you're making good bucks at it, and probably even help a few people.” “Sure,” I responded, “but not you, I guess.” He then elaborated on how bad it feels to be stuck in a dead-end job, not being interested during most of his work time but afraid to quit and lose the security that a regular salary provides. After some self-reflection, I said something like: “I think I may know a bit what it feels like, Fred. Several minutes ago, when you were talking about my not being able to do much for you, I was feeling pretty inept—there was something wrong with me for not being able to do more. I gather that's something like the feeling you're talking about, what you experience so much of the time.” “Yeah, I suppose so,” Manfred allowed. He paused, then smiled appreciatively and resumed talking about his feelings of frustration and defeat in most areas of his life, moving more directly to his humiliation about his current life circumstances. In this brief vignette, shame plays a central role in the intersubjective interplay between patient and therapist. I felt, in his initial silence and opening comment about his boredom at work, that he was reliving his sense of inadequacy and unworthiness at not having attained his destiny, and I made a genetic interpretationregarding his mother in an attempt to open his shame to our consideration. Instead, my comment appeared to have been experienced as an assault—a criticism, an empathic (self-object) failure, itself an instigator of shame and anger (as results frequently from selfobject failures). The selfobject dimension came to the foreground (Stolorow and Lachmann, 1984-1985) as Manfred felt a breach, experienced his own further humiliation, and attacked me, the offending selfobject, in a miniexpression of rage. I took in his sarcastic attack and found myself assuming responsibility for the rupture, experiencing self-doubt around this impression of technical error and questioning my own abilities as a therapist for Manfred. With this personal discomfort, I also observed my wish to “move on” to the next patient, a momentary example of collusion with Manfred to avoid mutual shame. As I reflected on these feelings, however, I recognized that my own shame and sense of inadequacy might parallel Manfred's own feelings about himself. I then decided to share my impression of ineptitude, with the goal of reestablishing a feeling of connection, a return to the self-selfobject bond. My thought had been that such an acknowledgment would help to restore his sense of our shared humanity—the alter ego (twinship) selfobjecttransference—enabling him to work at examining further his feelings of lassitude and failure in his life goals. Exploration of his anger over empathic/selfobject failures took place in many other interactions between us, though not primarily in this one. Certainly, different therapeutic avenues might have been pursued. I could have decided to confront and explore his anger over my interpretive comment or his envyabout my presumed professional success. I could have silently contained my recognition of resonance with his shame and, enlightened by my own feelings, proceeded exclusively to explore his shame. My decision to share what I felt to be my own similar feelings reflected conviction about the relevance of the transferential self-selfobject bond between us and the importance of facilitating the repair of the twinship (or, perhaps better, the kinship) relationship. Restoration of the selfobject bondin no way compromises potential subsequent exploration of the meaning of the patient's earlier feelings. In fact, without reestablishment of the background selfobjectconnection, useful interpretive work is less possible. How did this parallel set of shame-infused feelings occur in both patient and therapist? I believe that such feelings exist as part of each of our separate experiences and that empathic attunement to our patients' disparaging convictions about themselves may call forth similar subjective affect states in the attentive therapist. I have previously referred to these shared shame experiences as examples of “projective identification,” as elaborated by Ogden (1982), representing qualities of relationship, communication, and attempts at ridding the self of noxious experiences. Projective identification, however, has been used to “blame the patient” for “inducing” his disavowed feelings in the therapist; the conceptions of role-responsiveness, affect resonance, and empathically inferred, shared affective experience emanating from similarities within the twinship selfobject transference are possible ways to understand Manfred's and my own common shame experiences. As in many effective therapeutic interventions,identification and resonance move in both directions. Having alluded to Manfred's envy of me, his therapist, I want to consider that aspect of idealization relating to his role in construction/creation of the idealizedselfobject whom he needed to help him soothe his feelings of shame. I have emphasized selfobject responsivenes as a necessary context for helping to ease shame (e.g., my adolescent camp experience). Kohut, however, has suggested that the self serves as a “center of initiative” as well as recipient of impressions. In its role as a center of initiative, as an exploratory agent seeking to solve and provide for its own requirements, the self plays a part as imaginer-creator of its own selfobjects. As agent, we scan the environment to find those persons who can meet our needs (as well as desires), who can assume those configurational contours that we require of our selfobjects. In the transference, we therapists become for our patients the manifest selfobject imbued with those qualities that they require to resume their path toward health and restoration. We are partially created as, and hence we become, the fantasy, the experience, the configuration that our patients need for mirroring,idealization, twinning, abrasive reactivity, as we take shape in response to their needs from us. Our patients' sense of agency, of participation in construction of theselfobject to ease, in this instance, feelings of shame, has prompted me to speak of a one-and-a-half- person psychology. We, the therapist-selfobject, are representative, in part, of a responsive caregiving environment and, in part, of the fantasied inventions of our patients' creativity and potential representatives of their relational needs. I have tried to show that analytic self psychology offers a most useful framework to contain and explain the development and experience of shame in our patients and in ourselves. Selfobject failure and nonattunement cause many developmental challenges and painful feelings, and I suggest that shame is one of the most central of these. As with the repair of any empathic rupture, the easing of that shame generated within the transference requires of the analytic therapist curiosity, exploration, openness, and acceptance. The richness of our interactions within therapy and the complexity of our therapeutic relationship invite the mending of that shame sensitivity forged in earlier unresponsive self- selfobject relationships. Not only do we therapists provide empathic antidotes to previous failures and misattunements, but we also allow ourselves to be given shape—created—by our patients, who are, after all, in the best position to define for us their own relational, selfobject needs. To help them with their shame, we need patience, attentiveness, perseverance, self-attunement; above all, we need to listen.

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