Shame and the family of feelings associated with it such as humiliation, mockery, ridicule, denigration, disparagement, being ‘diss’d’ etc. hardly figure in the writings of Dicks, Fairbairn, Klein and Money Kyrle. Yet it is the emotion supremely associated with splitting and schizoid states. Some argue that there is no difference between guilt and shame, but the philosopher Bernard Williams, in ‘Shame and Necessity’, succinctly and clearly distinguishes between the two: ‘The psychological model for each emotion involves an internalised figure. In the case of shame this is a watcher or a witness. In the case of guilt the figure is a victim or an enforcer.’ (p. 219) ‘In contrast to guilt, there is no need with shame that the viewer should be angry or otherwise hostile. All that is necessary is that the viewer should perceive that very situation or characteristic that the subject feels is an inadequacy, failing or loss of power.’(p.221) In recent years James Gilligan, Head of Studies in Violence at Harvard and for more than thirty years in charge of the mental health provision in the Massachusetts prison system has drawn attention to the key role of shame and the family of feelings associated with it in precipitating violence. Shame is the bacillus of violence, he argues, the vector is the kind of society that leaves people vulnerable to it, i.e. societies where there is a high degree of inequality in the form of poverty, racism, and discrimination on grounds of gender, sexuality and age. His experience of psychotherapeutic practice over thirty years with prisoners who had been convicted of horrible acts of violence taught him that they had committed these acts because their victim had ‘diss’d’ them, and that if they did not respond with violence they would be regarded as gay. Gilligan’s findings are remarkably close to those of Henry Dicks, and indeed he points out that Hitler came to power on the promise of undoing the ‘shame of Versailles’, but Gilligan came to his conclusions unaware of Dicks’s work.
Gilligan claims that education, and groupwork that challenges toxic patriarchal/authoritarian ideas about masculinity, have radically reduced recidivism in the prison system, but he has also been keen to draw attention to the fact that his findings have far reaching socio-political implications, as indeed does the work of Henry Dicks. There is a danger, however, that any attempt to base policies on them may be dismissed as ‘utopian’, with the argument that utopian thinking derives from apocalyptic ideation and always ends in violence. Neither claim has any historical foundation. Norman Cohn points out that apocalyptic ideas appealed to the marginalised, to the landless, or those with too little land to support life, to the powerless, who were understandably attracted to the notion of an all-powerful god who would rescue them and punish their abusers. The major example of apocalyptic thinking in the past two thousand years, moreover, has been Christianity, which, at its very heart, has a profound commitment to non-violence. Utopian experiments may derive from apocalyptic ideas or they may not, but there are various examples like Robert Owen’s New Lanark that simply came to a peaceful end.
