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Inner Life

Shame and Guilt

Shame and guilt are often spoken of as if they were the same thing, and in everyday life they often arrive together. But they feel different from the inside. Guilt says, I did something bad. It points at an act, and it tends to come with an urge to apologize, confess or make amends. Shame says, I am bad. It points at the whole self, and it tends to come with an urge to hide, shrink or disappear.

Helen Block Lewis (1971) gave this distinction its classic form. In shame, she wrote, the self is the focus of evaluation: the person feels exposed, small and defective, often in the imagined eyes of another. In guilt, the focus is on a specific thing done or not done, and on its effects on someone else. Most later research and theory, across psychoanalysis and academic psychology, builds on Lewis’s distinction (Tangney & Dearing, 2002).

Both feelings are part of ordinary life, and both are useful. Guilt helps us notice when we have hurt someone and motivates repair. A measure of shame protects privacy and dignity. The difficulty comes when shame is chronic and global, when guilt is out of all proportion to the act, or when either feeling is so painful that it has to be kept out of awareness.

Core Ideas

How Different Thinkers See It

Freud: Guilt and the Superego

Freud wrote far more about guilt than about shame. In The Ego and the Id (1923) he described the superego, the internalized authority formed from identification with the parents, and located guilt in the tension between it and the ego. He noticed that guilt can be unconscious: some people seem driven by a need for punishment they cannot explain. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he argued that the sense of guilt is the central problem of civilized life, because aggression that cannot be expressed outward is turned back against the self by a harsh conscience. In Mourning and Melancholia (1917) he observed that the self-reproaches of melancholia often fit a lost or disappointing other better than they fit the person making them.

Klein: Guilt and Reparation

Melanie Klein described a developmental shift from a world sorted into all-good and all-bad to one in which the same person is seen as both loved and hated (Klein, 1935). This shift, which she called the depressive position (see positions), brings a new kind of guilt: the painful realization that one’s anger has been aimed at someone one loves. For Klein this guilt is not only a burden. It is the source of reparation, the wish to make good the damage, which she saw as one root of love, care and creativity (Klein & Riviere, 1937). Donald Winnicott (1963) recast the same achievement in gentler terms as the development of the capacity for concern. In this tradition, being able to feel ordinary guilt is a sign of health.

Lewis: Shame, Guilt and Bypassed Shame

Helen Block Lewis studied recorded therapy sessions and found that shame was everywhere but rarely named (Lewis, 1971). She described two forms of unacknowledged shame. In overt, unidentified shame, the person feels painfully uncomfortable but calls it something else: awkwardness, foolishness, feeling “stupid.” In bypassed shame, the feeling barely registers at all; instead there is a flurry of distracting thought, or a rush of anger. Lewis linked unacknowledged shame to what she called “humiliated fury,” rage that follows a shaming moment and is often aimed at the person who seemed to witness it.

Tomkins and Nathanson: Shame as an Affect

Silvan Tomkins counted shame-humiliation among the innate affects. In his account, shame is triggered when interest or enjoyment is interrupted without being fully extinguished: you reach toward something or someone, and the reaching is checked (Tomkins, 1963). The eyes drop, the head turns away, the face flushes. Donald Nathanson (1992) built on Tomkins to describe the compass of shame, four common ways people defend against it:

Withdrawal
Hiding, going quiet, leaving the room or the relationship.
Attack self
Self-deprecation, often pre-emptive: put yourself down before anyone else can.
Avoidance
Distraction, bravado, substances, a show of not caring; anything that keeps the feeling from being felt.
Attack other
Blame, contempt or anger directed at someone else, which shifts the feeling of being small onto them.

The compass is a useful reminder that shame often appears in disguise. The self-critic and the contemptuous critic of others may be responding to the same feeling.

Kohut and Morrison: Shame and Narcissism

Heinz Kohut saw shame as closely bound to self-esteem. When a child’s need to be admired and delighted in (what he called mirroring) goes unmet, or when a person’s display of themselves meets indifference, the result is shame, and sometimes narcissistic rage, an intense, unforgiving anger at whoever exposed the vulnerability (Kohut, 1971, 1972). Andrew Morrison (1989) argued that Kohut had underplayed how central shame is to all of this. In Shame: The Underside of Narcissism, he described shame as the feeling of failing to live up to one’s ideal self, and narcissistic grandiosity as, in part, a defense against it. This is why shame sits at the heart of the narcissistic style, often hidden beneath confidence.

Wurmser: The Mask of Shame

Léon Wurmser’s The Mask of Shame (1981) explored shame in great depth and stressed that it has a protective as well as a painful side. Alongside shame as an acute feeling of exposure and the anxiety of being shamed, he described shame as a guardian of privacy, modesty and discretion: the sense that some things should not be seen. He also emphasized how often shame is concealed behind other feelings and behaviors, a mask over a mask.

Tangney and Dearing: The Research

June Tangney and Ronda Dearing (2002) brought the distinction into empirical psychology, using measures that ask how people would respond to everyday scenarios. Across many studies, they found that a tendency toward guilt (feeling bad about specific acts) was associated with empathy, taking responsibility, and constructive ways of handling anger. A tendency toward shame (feeling bad about the whole self) was associated with less empathy, more blaming of others, more hostility, and more psychological symptoms. Their work suggests that guilt, when it is proportionate and about behavior, is a largely adaptive moral emotion, while chronic shame tends to be harmful (Tangney, Stuewig & Mashek, 2007).

How It Shows Up

In Personality Styles

Shame and guilt are distributed unevenly across personality styles. The depressive style is organized largely around guilt and self-criticism: the conviction that one is to blame. The narcissistic style is organized around shame: the fear of being found wanting, often hidden beneath confidence or contempt. Obsessive-compulsive people often struggle with guilt over impulses as well as acts, and masochistic patterns can involve a bargain with guilt in which suffering seems to earn the right to love. McWilliams (2011) stresses that telling guilt-driven from shame-driven suffering matters a great deal, because what helps one can make the other worse.

Examples

The following vignettes are composites, not real people.

The Missed Birthday

Two friends both forget a mutual friend’s birthday. One feels a pang, calls to apologize, and plans a dinner to make up for it. The other feels sick, decides she is a terrible friend, and avoids the person for weeks because facing them is unbearable. The first is guilt; the second is shame, and the shame, ironically, does the friendship more damage than the forgotten birthday did.

The Unspoken Subject

Over several months, Marcus writes often about work, his partner and his running. He mentions his brother only in passing, always with a quick change of subject. Eventually he writes that his brother is in prison and that he has never told anyone at work. Nothing about it was a secret he was keeping on purpose; it was simply too exposing to put into words. Lewis would have recognized this kind of shame: present all along, but shown mainly by its absence.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Embarrassment
Embarrassment is lighter, more public and shorter-lived; it is often about a social slip rather than a flaw in the self, and can even be funny afterwards.
Humiliation
Humiliation is shame inflicted by another person, often deliberately, and tends to carry more anger at the one who did it.
Regret
Regret is wishing something had gone differently. It need not involve harm to anyone or any judgment of the self.
Low self-esteem
Chronically low self-esteem is a standing state; shame is a feeling that comes in waves, though a person prone to shame often has fragile self-esteem.

History

Early psychoanalysis focused on guilt. Freud’s superego (1923) and Klein’s depressive position (1935) both centered on it, and shame was often treated as a less mature or more superficial feeling. Erik Erikson (1950) gave both a place in his developmental stages, pairing “autonomy versus shame and doubt” in toddlerhood with “initiative versus guilt” in the preschool years. Gerhart Piers and Milton Singer (1953) linked shame to the ego ideal and guilt to the superego.

The turn toward shame came in the 1960s and 1970s. Tomkins (1963) made shame a basic affect, Lewis (1971) showed how pervasive and unrecognized it was in therapy, and Kohut (1971) placed it at the center of narcissistic vulnerability. Wurmser (1981), Morrison (1989) and Nathanson (1992) built a substantial psychoanalytic literature on shame, and Tangney and colleagues brought the distinction into mainstream research from the 1990s onward.

Sources