Shame Experience: an Interviewing Study.

This study explores experiences frequently labeled with words such as "shame," "embarrassment," and "humiliation." Five men and five women were interviewed, in most cases for four to five hours. The interviews were oriented toward illuminating the qualities and functions of "shame" experience in each individual's life and language. I utilized no tightly predetermined interview schedule. The course of interviews followed from the nature of the descriptive and life-historical material which emerged. Relationships between common affect labels like "shame" and subjects' descriptions of emotional states were discussed with particular attention to the range of meanings attached to the words "shame," "humiliation," and "embarrassment." The interviews resulted in observations that conventional feeling words are oversimple, modestly valuable means of designating particular experiences. Several theories of "shame" which associate the shame experience (or shame "affect") with a single conflict, such as a conflict over phallic inferiority, were shown to represent interpretations of shame experience more limited in focus than the experiences subjects described in association to the word, "shame." Shame-themes in subjects' discourse emerged in relation to a great variety of specific concerns about the self and in relation to pervasive doubts about the individual's value, in his own estimation or in the judgement of a beloved other person. Shame-themes were distinguished from shame experiences because protocols in which experienced shame was denied often were replete with references to others' shames or to hypothetical shame situations. Shifts in emotion between shame-like states and other states of emotion were described and discussed; and both the painful and protective aspectes of different feeling states were considered in order to enhance underst and ing of the constant dynamic flux between emotional states. Finally, I described complex patterns of actually experienced shame-like feeling with emphasis on the idiosyncratic character of the individual's feeling life and with attention to how description of the subtle qualities of feeling experience enhances our underst and ing of crucial elements of an individual's self structure.PhDClinical psychologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158699/1/8204722.pd