Commentary: is the paradigm for humiliation sufficiently complex?

The authors Torres and Bergner present a simple, elegant paradigm for understanding the phenomenon of humiliation. They suggest it may have universal applicability and may be of heuristic value for clinicians and policy-makers involved in forensic and social arenas. They offer case examples to illustrate its utility. It is open to question, however, whether the paradigm is sufficiently complex to encompass all the variables in actual situations. In real life, the evolution of humiliation is a highly complicated, often messy process that takes place over time and often results in intense feelings of humiliation in more than one person, often affecting several persons. The authors' examples are reexamined from alternate assumptions about what may have happened in each case. An additional case example illustrates a high degree of interpersonal complexity, suggesting that actual situations may be too unwieldy to allow for simple analysis by the paradigm.