Shame, stigma and medicine

When, in the late 1980s, the psychiatrist Donald Nathanson organised a symposium on the nature of shame, it turned out to be the first such event to deal with the subject in the history of psychiatry or psychoanalysis on either side of the Atlantic. It seems strange that such a ubiquitous emotion had excited so little academic interest to that point, but as Nathanson points out—shame makes us so uncomfortable that we will go to great lengths to avoid it. Yet, despite our efforts to ignore it, shame remains universal— there can be few of us who have not been seared by shame at some stage of our life. In fact, some philosophers argue that shame is inescapable in human experience, a fundamental part of child development that textures personal, social and political aspects of adolescent and adult life. 4 As Tanner states (when responding to an accusation of impudence) in Shaw’s Man and Superman: