The eyes of shame

Ayers, M. (2000). The eyes of shame (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2000). UMI no. 3081676

To the person who suffers shame, the world is full of eyes, crowded with things and people that can see. Cold, annihilating eyes watch every movement and moment of self. The point of anguish and despair in shame is this element of exposure. One is visible and not ready to be visible, looking and not ready to see.

Ancient and modern writers of all persuasions—psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and novelists—have long noted the visual and facial components in the phenomenon of shame. In fact, shame's presence in the Story of Creation, the Western world's depiction of the beginning of human history, is linked to the eye and was the reason Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves. On both a collective, archetypal level and an individual, developmental one, shame manifests itself most through the eye. It is mediated and conveyed by the idea of vision, and cannot arise without this perceptual element.

Despite its prevalence as one of the deepest, most fundamental emotional experiences for all mankind, and the recent proliferation of explorations into shame, the amplification of shame's quintessential phenomenological image-the human eye-has not been developed. This study is an effort to explore the eye as a natural symbol for shame in order to open a portal of vision into the unconscious depths and intrapsychic dynamics of shame in the core of the self.

Using psychological literature, infant and developmental research, archaeological studies, philosophy, the visual and literary arts, myths, fairytales, and clinical case examples to reflect the eyes of shame excavates another layer of its meaning, a strata barely visible to the naked eye but which manifests through eye contact. This kind of precise looking has identified shame as a core affect in psychotic anxieties. Absolute shame is ultimately about an experience of mother's eyes during the holding phase of psychological development, resulting in the intensification of psychotic anxieties with the image of the eye at their core. The hollow, dead, mechanical, or envious eyes that do not reflect the infant but carry the mother's disturbance petrifies the self. Such eye contact at life's earliest stage forms the internal, object relationship that generates pathological shame, resulting in a self obliterated by the eyes of the other.

The image of the eye provides not only insights into shame in the core of the self, but also a means of metabolizing shame's presymbolic, concrete object representation into a conscious, archetypal symbol of the totality of the self. Analysis at this deep level transforms disintegrating shame, and restores it to its rightful place as a spark of self-awareness.