The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma

Jeffrey Kauffman, Jeffrey Kauffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135841133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Shame is a common and pervasive feature of the human response to death and other losses, yet this often goes unrecognized due to a reluctance to acknowledge and confront it. This book intends to expose shame for what it is, allowing clinicians to see that it is the central psychological force in the understanding of death and mourning. Kauffman and his fellow authors explore the psychology of shame via observation, reflection, theory, and practice in order to demonstrate the significant role it can play in our processing of grief, death, and trauma. The authors avoid defining a unified theory of shame in order to emphasize its multitude of meanings and the impact this has on grief and grief therapy. First-person narratives provide a personal look at death and associated feelings of guilt, shock, and grief; and other chapters consider shame in the context of cultural differences, recent events, and contemporary art, literature, and film.This is the first book to offer a comprehensive examination of this topic and, as such, will be a valuable resource for all clinicians who work with clients affected by grief and loss.

SECTION 1
Introductory Essay

CHAPTER 1
On the Primacy of Shame

Jeffrey Kauffman

THE PARTICULARITY OF SHAME AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTION TO DEATH

My aim in this chapter is to make a case that shame is a pervasive feature of the human response to death and other loss, to indicate the significance of shame in grief and trauma, and to expand our understanding of shame. In both our common and scientific views of grief, shame is barely recognized; there is broad sociocultural support in the belief that shame is not central to grief. The argument in this chapter, however, is that shame is both a general and a particular feature of grief. Shame is present in the grieving self’s experience of itself, and it is a particular feature of grief, co-occurring with other features of the grief experience, as in shame associated with any particular thought, feeling, or meaning.

Death and the bond broken by death can be experienced as devaluing the self. One may feel naked in face of death. Abandonment and broken attachment shame disconnects a person from the social world and from oneself. It weakens a person’s sense of familiarity in the world and with their own self. Shame prompts disconnection; and disconnection is, itself, experienced as shameful. The disconnective nature of grief is shameful. Any aspect of the self’s reflexive reality may disconnect, including disconnection of self from the social world and from itself, a fragmentation of consciousness, loss of a sense of place in time, emotional dislocation, disruption of a sense of identity, or loss of a sense of being or belonging. Disconnection exposes the self. Exposure disconnects.

Death may objectify the appearance of the self to its own self, as in mortification. The very preoccupation with death and with oneself in mourning is felt to be shameful. The sacred terror of death shames, and believing death to be a moral judgment is being under a burden of shame. The stigma of death is shaming. To experience oneself in one’s grief to be a victim of death is to be ashamed.

Persons are delivered to shame by the inward violence touched off in grief. Grief can arouse anger and rage, about which one may feel ashamed. A person may feel ashamed of the fear of death; and quite remarkably, a person is likely to feel shame about their shame (Lewis, 1971) of death. All of reflexive life may be experienced with shame; and this is especially true of the hypercathected inner world of grieving.

Perceived weakness and failure in grief are shameful. Experienced deprivation of any kind can be shameful. Grief, struggling against powerlessness/helplessness in face of death, is, in being vanquished by death, shamed. Grief anxiety that one’s world is out of control induces shame and shame heightens loss of control anxiety.

A mourner may experience guilt-shame: a belief that oneself is to blame (shame) prompts belief that one’s actions are to blame (guilt). It has often been observed that guilt is the feeling that “I have done something wrong,” and shame is the feeling that “I am something wrong.” In grief, so far as my being is at stake, self-blame is shame. The incitement of shame can overthrow a sense of the right to exist, and install inward deadness or other shame dissociative states. To be disenfranchised in grief, to be in a social environment in which grief must be hidden, to be a social outcast in one’s grief, is to experience one’s grief, and thereby oneself, to be shameful. Shame is, whatever else it may be about, always shame about oneself. The self-reproach and regrets of the dying, whether death is imminent or not, are much more shame than guilt. And in mourning, the will of the deceased, as it is experienced in mourning, is enforced by shame. Guilt, widely recognized to occur in grief, could serve being reevaluated for how much it is actually or primarily shame. Wherever conscience comes into play in grief, which is, I think, far more often than usually accounted, there is guilt, but more potently, there is shame, such as in angry judgments against oneself that accompany, and sometimes drive, object-focused grief experience. The guilt in Freud’s melancholia is not guilt, but, in its devaluing self-reproaches, in its very self-preoccupation and self-deprecation, it is shame. And, in the puzzling and fundamental sense in which loss turns a person against himself, the identity-anxiety that is aroused is shame.

There are many ways in which grief arouses shame anxiety, such as shame for being alive while the other is dead, for the inward disorder of grief, for being frightened, being vulnerable to death, being outcast, helpless, and abandoned; shame for the whole inner world of grief and diverse circumstances of grief. Because traumatic grief, in particular, is soaked in shame, any specific grief anxiety is, in traumatic grief, more likely to be shameful.

The initial shock of death’s omnipotence knocks the self unconscious. The disconnected self in grief implodes with overwhelming, unfathomable death. Presented to the omnipotence of death, the self covers its eyes and turns in horror—while it internalizes a shame of death. Death, lodged at the core of grief, is a shame phenomenon, a shame before death’s omnipotence. Grief therapy responds to the needs of the griever, including the need for shelter in the omnipotence/shame spectrum of grief. Shame before the omnipotence of death insinuates itself into other feelings about oneself in grief.

The dead body, in the sheer physicality of death, may inspire shame, and its symbolic introject, a subjective representation of the dead body, may be shrouded in awe and shame. Rituals and some practices with the dead body are carefully constructed and carried out to deal with the shame power of the body, particularly the shame of the dead body as a sacred/profane being. Fear of the dead body may arouse shame. Fear of the death that the dead body stands for may be shameful. The uncanniness of a dead body that resembles a living body, which was recently alive and now is not, may result in a feeling of shame for the viewer. There is shame also in the awe and dread and mystery of the dead body. The shared mortality that the dead body signifies may inspire shame.

The experience of grief cannot be understood without taking an account of the shame that is so covert, yet so diverse and powerful a grief force. Each and every way that loss may be typologized has characteristic shame features: shame of a violent death, a suicide, a homicide, a comrade in arms dying, accidental death, a specific illness; the death of a person toward whom one feels responsibility. Every bond, when broken, has shame vulnerabilities; every type of loss and every individual loss has its own unique shame propensities. Death and loss are prone, in various undertows of subjectivity, to be experienced as saying something (shameful) about oneself: shame of one’s own mortality, shame at having lost a loved one, shame over not having loved well enough or been loved well enough, shame about one’s grief and its vulnerabilities, shame at the self-absorption of grief, shame of being overpowered by grief, and, most remarkably, shame of shame. Shame, co-occurring with specific grief features, is a key risk factor for mourning complications.

The diverse, many-faced nature of shame and the diverse particularity of shame in grief suggest that perhaps shame is less a specific feature of grief than a generalized feature that shows up in the particularities of grief. Perhaps shame is more like a medium of grief, a self-woundedness that bleeds through the particularities of shame in grief.

SEPARATION ANXIETY

Broken attachments not only break a bond with the deceased but tear at the bond of the self with its own self. Exposed by no longer being bonded to an attachment object, the self experiences itself to be abandoned unto death, thrown out from under the protective cover of attachment, exposed to an abyss. Exposed by abandonment, overwhelmed in the shame of being disposed of, negated in the sense of not having a right to exist, the shame of separation anxiety diminishes the self, and raises the risk of a pervasive shame-prone grief disposition—which prevents mourning, as well as intimacy with self or others. The most persistent and painful wound of separation anxiety, a pain on which grief “gets stuck,” is a shame anxiety that accompanies and sometimes saturates grief. The self is, in separation anxiety, thrown into shame anxiety. That is, separation anxiety is an exposure of the self, a type of shame anxiety. The self-psychology of separation anxiety is in the shame meaning of separation.

Separation anxiety in traumatic grief may propel one into nihilistic panic, with one’s sense of being and one’s very meaningfulness disintegrating, the self in full shame retreat, covering its tracks as best it can. The collapsing self of traumatic grief is in a state of shame. Traces of separation anxiety shame are also present in “normal” grief. So, shame is not something that is present or absent in grief, so much as being more or less present. The attachment bond is regulated by shame, and disturbances in the bond are disturbances of shame.

SIGNS OF THE DEVELOPMENTAL BEGINNINGS OF SHAME: EXPOSURE ANXIETY IN THE FACE OF A STRANGER

Developmentally, shame may be seen in stranger-anxiety, emerging from within the space of the toddler’s bond with mother. The expression of stranger-anxiety by retreating, hiding, and covering the face is in response to experiencing an intrusion upon the private space of the maternal bond. Stranger-anxiety is an expressive language gesture. But, it is not simply expressive. It is a communicative act of showing. In stranger-anxiety, shame is enacted by gestures of hiding and covering. In a stranger-anxiety enactment, hiding itself does not simply occur, but hiding is performed, and signals distress over intrusion into privacy. In the hiding gesture the toddler appears to be trying to protect from and negotiate the intrusive gaze of the stranger through performing an act of hiding. Stranger-anxiety is a shame performance for the purpose of warding off exposure. Stranger-anxiety is a sign of developing self-consciousness and an enactment of an early anxiety about securing the boundaries of otherness and self. Stranger-anxiety displays a developmentally early anxiety about the violation of privacy and intimacy.

It is also worth noting that this gesture, signaling a need for safe cover, is sometimes taken by adults as a cue for teasing—as if it registers as shame, but the shame is shameful, and defensively projected back onto the toddler. The intruder’s shaming of the baby by his own shame is an unconscious exhibition of shame, a social shame performance. Shame, in this case, leads to covert aggression by the witness of the stranger-anxiety exhibition of shame. The projective shame deployments of teasing give back to the toddler just what the body language of hiding is seeking to protect against. Stranger-anxiety threatens the internal space of “the privacy of the self with itself and mother” where the capacity to mourn is also developing. With the developmental emergence of shame-organized self-consciousness, a baby becomes, in the experience of others and, most probably, itself, a person with the presence and self-awareness of personhood. The capacity to mourn develops along with this.

TRAUMATIC SHAME TEMPORALITY

In traumatic wounding, in terms of memory and expectation, the anxiety that occurs is driven by an implicit certainty that what has already happened is going to happen (Winnicott, 1974). The horizon of posttraumatic temporality is that what has already happened but not been experienced (Blanchot, 1994) is anticipated. Posttraumatic consciousness lives into the memory of the trauma as an anxious anticipation, which operates as the repetition of traumatic shame.

The temporality of what has already happened, but not yet been “realized,” happening again is expressed in the concepts of recurrence, return, and repetition. Freud, for example, proposes the repetition compulsion as a return of death (Freud, 1961). From the first, at the birth of internal time consciousness (Husserl, 1964) death is repressed, and temporality is its return. As time passes, the primary repression of death keeps up the pressure and the boundary of primary repression is breached again and again. The temporality that begins with the repression of death, the temporality of the repetition compulsion, living toward death that has already happened, is the temporality in which anxiety occurs. Primary repression is a concept about what is denied consciousness at the beginning and persists as underlying anxiety, such as annihilation anxiety. Primary repression is a returning to consciousness of a primal anxiety buried at the origin of consciousness. Anxiety in the face of death is a surge of indwelling death anxiety returning, triggered by the face of death.

The concept of primary repression hypothesizes a trauma at the origin of consciousness, which establishes a temporality of the return of the repressed as the temporality of selfhood. The traumatic temporality of the return of the repressed and protentional temporality, the openness and intentionality of consciousness toward the future, coexist (in such a way that death is the beginning and the end of consciousness).

The temporality of reflexive consciousness toward death is a repetition compulsion, and anxiety is the vehicle of repetition. Traumatic anxiety works in the same way as primary repression, repeating and reliving dissociated trauma. Shame is the concealment power and enforcer of repression and dissociation. The shame of the repressed and dissociated returning compels their repetition. The psychoanalytic therapeutics of bringing traumatic repetition to a rest includes, then, a negotiation of the shame defenses of the repressed and dissociated. Shame-driven repetition of traumatic grief is brought to a rest by recognizing and reckoning with the split off shame.

TRAUMATIC SHAME DISSOCIATION

Traumatic grief shame occurs in fragmentations or dissociations, defilements and humiliations, helplessness, and other overwhelming grief anxieties. Traumatic shame damages the “protective cover of beliefs,” which maintains the integrity of identity and valuations. Traumatic grief destabilizes or disintegrates basic beliefs, which give the self cover— belief that I am, that I am valuable, that order is sufficiently constant and predictable, and that I am safe. Loss of the protective cover of beliefs is a symptom of traumatic shame (Kauffman, 2002).

Disconnections of the self with itself in grief, dissociated fragments of self, and grief are shame phenomena that are particularly noteworthy in traumatic stress anxiety. Traumatic stress anxie...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION: SPEAKING OF SHAME
• ABOUT THE EDITOR
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• SECTION 1: INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
• SECTION 2: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE
• SECTION 3: PSYCHOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON SHAME AND GRIEF
• SECTION 4: CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
• SECTION 5: LANGUAGES OF ART
• SECTION 6: SOCIAL CONSCIENCE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SHAME