Rev. Latinoam. Psicopat. Fund., São Paulo, 21(4), 779-797, dez. 2018 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1415-4714.2018v21n4p779.6 Notes on the Evolution of the Relationship between Guilt and Shame in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology Nota sobre evolução da relação entre culpa e vergonha em psicanálise e antropologia François Sauvagnat*1 779 The author examines evolution of the relationship between the concepts of shame and guilt in anthropology and in psychoanal- ysis between 1900 and 1980. He finds that three periods have succeeded; in a first period guilt was presented as more essential in symptom-construction than shame in occidental societies; in anthropology shame was mainly viewed as germane of primitive or non-occidental societies, and guilt was seen as an “occidental” feeling. He shows that this view has been criticized in the 1960ies, and that nowadays shame is recognized to be much more pervasive in occidental cultures and guilt is also present in non-occidental settings Key words: Shame, guilt, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history *1 University of Rennes (Rennes, France). REVISTA LATINOAMERICANA DE PSICOPATOLOGIA FUNDAMENTAL … Scham, die als eine exquisit weibliche Eigenschaft gilt, aber weit mehr konventionell ist, als man denken sollte…. (Shame, which passes as an exquisitely feminine peculiarity, but is much more conventional than one might think…) S. Freud, Die Weiblichkeit, in Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. X. Mourir de honte est le seul affect de la mort qui la mérite (Dying of shame is the only affect of death that deserves it) J. Lacan (2007). L’Envers de la psychanalyse, 17 juin 1970, p. 209. 780 In the last hundred years, the notions of shame and guilt, and the relationship between both of them have been through important modi- fications in the fields of social anthropology and psychoanalysis; they have been successively considered as opposed and even contradic- tory, with guilt being seen as a more “noble”, “civilized” “occidental” feeling than shame — the notion of the “lack of empathy” in “shame cultures” is still quite popular in the mass-media —; later, the articu- lation between both notions, and the idea that they should not be seen as separate entities came to the fore; ultimately several authors have promoted the idea that shame was perhaps a more significant notion that guilt — but their opinions were far more dissenting than what one might think. We shall attempt to describe and disentangle a few of the paradoxes involved. Freud’s preference for guilt Quite rightfully, the prevalence of the notion of guilt in the human sciences has been strongly associated with psychoanalysis; Rev. Latinoam. Psicopat. Fund., São Paulo, 21(4), 779-797, dez. 2018 ARTIGOS the frequency of the occurrences of the term Schuld in Freud’s Gesammelte Werke (Freud, 1999) — indicated in the Gesamtregister included in the eighteenth volume (674 occurrences) — dwarves that of the other notions we will discuss, like Schande (only 5!) and even its semantic complement Scham (54) — Schande is mainly applied as an “objective” notion (as in “Jemandem Schande machen”shaming someone, etc.), and Scham as a subjective one (as in “sich schämen”, to be ashamed). It seemed quite obvious, from the start, that Freud tended to consider the lexical couple Scham/Schande as depicting rather artificial, conventional feelings imposed on individuals by a certain state of social mores. As Ernest Jones has rightfully put forward, psycho- analysis emerged at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, a puritan era that certainly did not make light of social conventions and heavily insisted on the obligation of moral purity, especially in women; however Freud’s own liberal inclinations, his support of several feminist movements (especially Helene Stöker’s “Sexualreform Bewegung”), of the pro-homosexual Humanitarian Committee (which lobbied to end the criminalization of homosexuality — Sodomie — in German and British law and to align them on the French legal system, that made it a crime to inquire about someone’s sexual orien- tations or practices), of the Youth Wandervogel movement and of course his 781 thesis that most of moral values could be secretly supported by not-so-moral instinctual tendencies, tended to lead him into the opinion that a fair propor- tion of shame feelings were in fact “falsche Scham” (Freud, 1895/1999a). This phrase which apparently is not so frequent in German might have been imitated from the extremely usual French “fausse honte”, especially in the French théâtre de boulevard, which deeply influenced one of Freud’s most favorite playwrights, JN Nestroy1 (Sauvagnat 2003). It happens to be a speci- ficity of the French word “honte” (of Germanic origin, related to Old High German Honida and Middle Dutch Hoonde, and phonetically associated with honneur, the origin of English honour in spite of its Latin origin),2 that whereas in medieval and baroque times it used to be a fairly frequent motive of duels and wars, most of its recent usage is negative, and in compa- rison with Scandinavian languages contemporary French is quite poor in 1 Johann Nepomuk Nestroy was recognized both as a master of the Viennese Fantasy theatre and of the importation of the French theatre de boulevard in Vienna; Freud quotes him extensively in Das Unheimliche. 2 Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, article Honte. <http://www. cnrtl.fr/etymologie/honte>. Rev. Latinoam. Psicopat. Fund., São Paulo, 21(4), 779-797, dez. 2018 REVISTA LATINOAMERICANA DE PSICOPATOLOGIA FUNDAMENTAL phrases and idioms concerning shame. It is a commonly assumed notion in the dominant French secular/republican/egalitarian ideology that one should not make too much fuss about his embarrassment (“toute honte bue”), avoid exaggerating the importance of social conventions, and denounce unneces- sary hypocrisy (which would lead someone to exhibit “false shame”, fausse honte) — even if the practice of duels subsisted into the XXth century in small segments of society (some journalists and politicians) and if another contra- dictory phrase, mourir de honte (“dying of shame”, but often in an ironical context) is also quite frequent. Guilt and symptom formation The main difference between shame (Scham/Schande) and guilt (Schuld), the overwhelming import attributed by Freud to the latter, lies in Freud’s claims about psychoneurotic symptom formation; a mere psycholo- gical trauma, he contended, is unable to create an enduring symptom unless a sexual signification becomes entailed into it; what he calls “sexual” here is 782 not only the emergence of embarrassment about some innocent game; it has to do with the subject’s initiative, be it action, thoughts or desires — no matter how secret the latter may be; Freud had a special word for this, “Urteil”, that is, judgment, understood as a mental act, a “decision” that did not need to be “fully conscious” to operate and involve the individual’s responsibi- lity. A signification could only have an enduring, symptom-building effect if the subject felt that he was somehow, in his fantasies, committed in a guilty sexual activity, i.e., that could have some disastrous consequences on himself, his kin and significant others; that this “judgment” was repressed, and often in a complex way, that it was not the mere effect of social pressures, but the result of conflicting unconscious mechanisms, this was at the core of what Freud was eager to assert. Although he never found quite a satisfactory expla- nation of the phenomenon — admitting that his evolutionary works, like “Totem and taboo” (Freud, 1915/1955b), and his attempts at historical recons- tructions, like “Moses and monotheism” (Freud, 1939/1953-74), contained much more hypotheses than verified facts, Freud nevertheless stuck to the notion that psychoneurotic symptoms were directly influenced by (mainly unconscious) guilt feelings. There have been several attempts to explain why such symptom- formations were linked to sexuality. The interpretations of Fromm, close to Rev. Latinoam. Psicopat. Fund., São Paulo, 21(4), 779-797, dez. 2018 ARTIGOS Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1944/2002) theory of reification as a perverse result of the dialectic of Reason, seemed to infer, following a Schellingian perspective (Sauvagnat, 2004), that the tragic events of the 30ies and 40ies were due to a kind of revenge of the myth against rationality; Wilhelm Reich, a famous proponent of the energizing qualities of genitality (the so-called “Orgone theory”), assumed that there had to be a special link between character defenses (constituting a “körperlicher Panzer”), pregenital sado-ma- sochist fixations and authoritarian social structure (Reich, 1933/1945). More modestly J. Lacan saw sexuality as a source of irreconcilable misunderstan- ding , and the prevalence of sexual themes (Weininger, 1906; Swoboda, 1904, Fliess, 1906) at the end of the XIXth century as promoting the new figure of the cheated master, as several of Freud’s observations clearly showed: the dream of the father who did not know that he was dead, (according to the subject’s desire), in Freud’s Formulierungen über den zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens (Freud 1911/1999c) and the famous Cracow- Lemberg joke, in which, Lacan argues, the real subject of enunciation is expressed as “I cheat you” (Freud, 1901/1999b; Lacan, 1963-1964/1977, p. 160). Compared to the meager comments he had on shame, Freud’s contri- 783 butions on guilt were intensely researched and documented. Not only did he