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).