Shame and Guilt in the Repetition Compulsion

I’ve said quite a bit in the space about the role of repetition in the understanding of “psychopathology”.  So far, most of the conceptualization done in this space has explored repetition in the context of grief and play.  And for good reason.  There’s a rich psychoanalytic tradition regarding the roles of grief and play in the context of doing therapy.

Though as of late, I’ve been thinking about the intersection of this concept with an affective component of the existential and phenomenological traditions.  That is the concept of guilt, as well as its companion emotion: shame.  It struck me when reading Being and Time, that Heidegger spends a considerable amount of time talking about the role of guilt in his movement towards concepts like care, anticipatory resoluteness, and the like.  However, there is no discussion of shame.  Similarly, shame did not really enter into the lexicon of psychoanalysis in a major way until well after Freud, with Freud being much more interested in the repression of guilt.

This has oftentimes been hard for me to reconcile in the development of my own ideas around this topic.  Primarily, I think this is because shame is such a pervasive topic in contemporary psychotherapy and narcissistic defenses (those most likely to defend against shame or an insufficiently developed self) are especially salient in the kind of activities people seem in large part to be getting up to these days.  I actually came to Kohut and self-psychology first, in terms of my awareness of any psychoanalytic theorists outside of the cultural monolith that is Freud.  It’s a set of conditions that for a long time informed the ways in which I reflected on intrapsychic phenomena and the human condition.  Though as I continue to reflect on what this might mean about the nature of contemporary pathology, I think this abundance of narcissistic tendencies in the present culture writ large could be thought of as a defense against the defense.  That is, the degree to which we see things like narcissistic tendencies and shame playing out could in fact be an indication of the degree to which people are defending against guilt through deliberately persistent and irreconciled defenses against shame.  And that, furthermore, the purpose of shame in the context of repetition is to preserve the repetition compulsion, while guilt is the “solution” to it.

The thing that has continued to strike me as I bear this out is that for both Heidegger and Freud, the experience of guilt is something to strive for.  I won’t go as far as to say this has been lost on me, but until quite recently I don’t think I had opened myself up to the possibility of what this might mean from a clinical sense.  I will often tell my clients that the presence of guilt is a good thing.  But more in the sense that openness to emotional experience carries value in and of itself.  What I failed to consider is that, in both the existential and the psychoanalytic tradition, guilt represents the capacity to take responsibility.  Meaning that guilt is not just good in the sense that being able to attend to it means having conscious awareness of experiential and existential conditions.  It is the best we can hope for.  Everything before guilt is a disavowal or a working through to get to that point.  It is an avoidance tactic against guilt’s necessary consequence, which is the anxiety of freedom and the responsibility to choose.

This is one of the spaces where, for me, existentialism and psychoanalysis begin to overlap.  It would seem that one way to understand the type of guilt and anxiety that psychoanalysis talks about is as a present-at-hand distillation (or ontic representation) of more ontological or existential experiences of anxiety and guilt.  Said another way, we are guilty and anxious already, we just only experience them affectively when our fallenness and the defenses against the experiencing of these conditions begins to breakdown, at which point we can see and name them as objects.  Of course, by this way of looking at it, we can’t be in these conditions consistently.  Though, it seems somehow, present cultural conditions being what they are, we’ve gotten considerably worse at being able to get there.

We could try to spend time figuring out why that is, or who’s to blame for it, whether economic forces, political forces, or some other structural element, but I think that would miss the point.  We’ve never wanted the responsibility of navigating our existential guilt and anxiety.  What is much more likely the case is that as our social structures have gotten more sophisticated over the last several hundred years, we’ve consequently gotten better at deflecting our responsibility for and to our own existence.  But the uncomfortable feelings that serve as the condition for our prior awareness of needing to take these feelings over continue to simmer underneath the surface and demand a defense to keep them at bay.  Therefore, shame.  With the added benefit that shame seems to possess the quality of being so burdensome that we never think to try to get beyond it in the sense of trying to feel our way through to the guilt and anxiety.  We simply assume it is the thing and then craft bodies of psychological and self-help literature and gurus to tell us about how deeply ashamed we are and what all we ought to be doing about that.

That’s not to say shame is not worth our consideration clinically or is somehow not a real or valid response to the things one might experience in the world.  Shame can be painful.  Debilitating even.  What I am wondering aloud here is if the kind of interventions we have developed to work through and resolve shame, that is broadly things like vulnerability and coming to accept our own dependency, go far enough.  I think back here to Loewald’s reflections on the Oedipal Complex.  That the purpose is not just to internalize and find “acceptable new object-relations”, but that this new organization also demands the “erection of the superego as a new differentiation in the ego” which is fancy psychoanalytic speak for something like “we must come to take over our dependency and explore it in the context of new relationships, but internalizing that aspect of our relationality and seeking it out in the world in new ways also calls us to take over the demands and responsibilities of our independent existence”.  It is deeply paradoxical.  It also signals that we must learn to effectively be with our shame and in being with our shame know that to do that authentically means we must also be able to and in fact should be present to what that means about our capacity to feel guilt.  By this measure, if one manages to work through deep seeded feelings of shame, but doesn’t notice a subsequent uptick in feelings of guilt and anxiety, then they’re not done yet.  Something got missed.  Something still needs to be taken over.

I mentioned my understanding of the role of repetition in all this, so I should mention something about that.  In this present construction and way of thinking, shame gets placed in the position of being that which maintains the felt inertia of the repetition compulsion.  I was thinking about this during my recent post on Fairbairn’s ego structures.  The whole cycle of the rejecting and exciting object is a visualization of the ways in which we are unworthy of or afraid to be open to the possibility of the love of another.  And Fairbairn is not unique in this regard.  Many psychoanalytic theorists operate under some principle of our need to grieve the relationships we desire in order to figure out how to make do with (and tolerate the disappointment in and insufficiency of) the ones that we get.  Shame, as a kind of dependency function, maintains us in a position of continuing to hold out for the idealized relationship.  It is propelled by a sense that the only love that would be enough to rescue us from our cycles of suffering is the kind of love envisioned by Winnicott’s omnipotent infant, where the only acceptable structure is the one in which the other can anticipate and effectively respond to our every need.

Guilt, on the other hand, provides a throughway to a new kind of relationship with our repetition.  It is not simply the awareness that in maintaining those cycles we are continuing to do some kind of harm to ourselves and others.  It is the attunement to, and perhaps amplification of, a feeling of responsibility to the ways in which our failure to grieve the things we know we can no longer realistically obtain sustains this cycle.  Guilt does not eliminate this cycle, but it forges the ground for a new way of being with it.  This should, if born out to its existential conclusion, be the necessary result of truly grieving the idealized dependency of the repetition, and supplanting it with an ability to own the complex reality of the dependence-independence matrixes we must navigate within the context of an authentic relationship with the world around us.

It is painful.  It is meant to be.  It also offers the possibility of being able to take ownership of and be truly responsive to the complicated dynamics of our own needs, wants, and desires.  But it is unsettling.  There is an existential dislocation that disturbs as a consequence of this and therefore keeps authentic relatedness at bay.  Therapy provides the possibility of doing it in the presence of another who can shepherd us through and share in the burden of holding that responsibility.  Who, through the ability to attune to their own challenges with this and step with us into the groundlessness that is the taking over of our thrown possibilities, can become a new object that helps to rid ourselves of the toxic shame that perpetuates these unwanted cycles and honors the discomfort and wisdom of the anxious wonder that accompanies true existential awareness.