There are specific experiences that shatter the eggshell of the self and spill the yolk of the unconscious, slippery and fertile, aglow with potential for progress. Disgrace is one in all them — an expertise personal and highly effective, rife with probably the most elemental questions of who we’re and the place we belong. At its core is a peculiar type of interior battle, through which one a part of the self gasps with revulsion on the decisions of one other, exposing the elemental incoherence of our interior lives and the eager for what D.H. Lawrence known as “dwelling unison,” exposing the unsteady foundations of actuality itself.
The pioneering sociologist and thinker Helen Merrell Lynd (March 17, 1896–January 30, 1982) examines disgrace as a singular lens on the self, and on the human potential for integration and transformation, in her revelatory 1958 ebook On Disgrace and the Seek for Identification (public library) — an investigation of the disconnect between the folks we expect ourselves to be and the folks we act ourselves into being, inviting a correct understanding of disgrace as a pathway towards a extra aware and coherent self.
Lynd writes:
Disgrace is an expertise that impacts and is affected by the entire self. This whole-self involvement is one in all its distinguishing traits and one which makes it a clue to id… On this second of self-consciousness, the self stands revealed. Coming immediately upon us, experiences of disgrace throw a flooding mild on what and who we’re and what the world we stay in is.
These experiences that contain the entire self are notably susceptible to our compulsion for classes and labels, born of an nervousness to include the within the finite the infinities of the thoughts, to wrest order from the chaos of the center. With a watch to the problem of comprehending and speaking such complicated experiences — experiences like love, surprise, longing, self-respect, and disgrace — Lynd cautions in opposition to the limiting nature of labels:
Reliance on accepted classes and strategies could imply that sure phenomena important for understanding id escape consideration. Within the current local weather of psychological thought any noticed human attribute speedily acquires a label, which encases it inside one of many experimentalists’ or the clinicians’ classes. Intensive as these classes are, utilized to some life conditions they could be extra constricting than informing.
Sure pervasive experiences, not simply labeled, could slip by the classes altogether or, if given a location and a reputation, could also be circumscribed in such a means that their important character is misplaced. Habituation to such utilization could blind us nonetheless additional to the need of looking extra deeply into the character of those experiences.
To look extra carefully at experiences “laborious to isolate and confine,” she argues, is to look into the very nature of the self, into what William James known as the “blooming buzzing confusion” of consciousness. Lynd writes:
It’s no accident that experiences of disgrace are known as self-consciousness. Such experiences are characteristically painful. They’re often taken as one thing to be hidden, dodged, lined up — even, or particularly, from oneself. Disgrace interrupts any unquestioning, unaware sense of oneself. However it’s doable that experiences of disgrace if confronted full within the face could throw an surprising mild on who one is and level the way in which towards who one could develop into. Absolutely confronted, disgrace could develop into not primarily one thing to be lined, however a constructive expertise of revelation.
A part of what makes disgrace so misunderstood and underinvestigated is that it’s typically conflated with guilt. Though the 2 could complement and reinforce each other, guilt tends to come up from the sensation of wrongdoing, of getting transgressed a boundary, whereas disgrace stems from the sensation of falling quick, of failing to succeed in a hope or meet an expectation, which anchors it in a deeper stratum of the persona — for guidelines and bounds are externally constructed, whereas our hopes, expectations, and beliefs are probably the most intimate constructing blocks of personhood. This is the reason an apology accepted and pardon granted can vanquish guilt, however they do little to allay disgrace. Lynd writes:
Guilt might be expiated. Disgrace, in need of a change of the self, is retained. This transformation means, in Plato’s phrases, a turning of the entire soul towards the sunshine.
Drawing on a kaleidoscope of examples from literature — Shakespeare and Sartre, The Bible and Anna Karenina, Virginia Woolf’s diaries and Huckleberry Finn — she observes that disgrace is most frequently contrasted not with extrinsic measures like righteousness and approval by others however with the fundamental, intrinsic values of fact and honor. It’s a mirror held as much as the self, brutal and sobering — a revelation of a profound breach between the perfect self, through which our self-image is rooted, and the true self. She writes:
Experiences of disgrace seem to embody the basis which means of the phrase — to uncover, to reveal, to wound. They’re experiences of publicity, publicity of peculiarly delicate, intimate, susceptible elements of the self. The publicity could also be to others however, whether or not others are or will not be concerned, it’s all the time… publicity to at least one’s personal eyes… Disgrace is the result not solely of exposing oneself to a different particular person however of the publicity to oneself of elements of the self that one has not acknowledged and whose existence one is reluctant to confess.
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The sensation of unexpectedness marks one of many central contrasts between disgrace and guilt. This unexpectedness is greater than suddenness in time; additionally it is an astonishment at seeing completely different elements of ourselves, aware and unconscious, acknowledged and unacknowledged, immediately coming collectively, and coming along with elements of the world now we have not acknowledged. Patterns of occasions (interior and outer) of which we’re not aware come unexpectedly into relation with these of which we’re conscious.
This sense of inner incongruence is probably the most painful facet of disgrace — a vivid reminder that we all know ourselves solely incompletely and have however marginal management over which elements of us take the reins of personhood at any given second. (And but this facet of self-surprise is one thing disgrace shares with among the most lovely capacities of consciousness — surprise and delight, additionally marked by the gasp at one other dimension of actuality revealed. Homer linked Aidos — the Greek goddess of disgrace — to awe.) Lynd writes:
Being taken unawares is shameful when what’s immediately uncovered is incongruous with, or manifestly inappropriate to, the state of affairs, or to our earlier picture of ourselves in it… We’ve acted on the idea of being one sort of particular person dwelling in a single sort of environment, and unexpectedly, violently, we uncover that these assumptions are false. We had thought that we had been capable of see round sure conditions and, as an alternative, uncover in a second that it’s we who’re uncovered; alien folks in an alien state of affairs can see round us.
What makes disgrace most insufferable is this sense of sudden expatriation from actuality, which leaves belief — in oneself, on the planet — dangerously jeopardized. Paradoxically, it’s typically not the darkest however the brightest in us that’s most susceptible to disgrace. Lynd writes:
A part of the problem in admitting disgrace to oneself arises from reluctance to acknowledge that one has constructed on false assumptions about what the world one lives in is and about the way in which others will reply to oneself… Disgrace over a sudden uncovering of incongruity mounts when what’s uncovered is inappropriate constructive expectation, completely happy and assured dedication to a world that proves to be alien or nonexistent… Much more than the uncovering of weak point or ineptness, publicity of misplaced confidence might be shameful — happiness, love, anticipation of a response that’s not there, one thing personally momentous obtained as inconsequential. The higher the expectation, the extra acute the disgrace.
Disgrace is so troublesome to bear as a result of it takes us again to the core vulnerabilities of childhood, that tender want for congruence between the world of our creativeness and the true world, the eager for a single world that coheres. Lynd writes:
Primary belief within the private and within the bodily world that surrounds him is the air that the kid should breathe if he’s to have roots for his personal sense of id and for the associated sense of his place on the planet. As he progressively differentiates the world of in right here from the world of on the market he’s consistently testing the coherence, continuity, and dependability of each… Expectation and having expectation met are essential in creating a way of coherence on the planet and in oneself.
As a result of it’s so rooted in our grasp of actuality, the disgrace of getting misjudged a state of affairs, misplaced an expectation, miscalculated one’s personal deserves, is a profound unmooring of the psyche:
What now we have thought we might depend on in ourselves, and what now we have regarded as the boundaries and contours of the world, end up immediately to not be the “actual” outlines of ourselves or of the world, or those who others settle for. We’ve develop into strangers in a world the place we thought we had been at residence. We expertise nervousness in turning into conscious that we can not belief our solutions to the questions Who am I? The place do I belong?
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As a result of persona is rooted in unconscious and unquestioned belief in a single’s rapid world, experiences that shake trusted anticipations and provides rise to doubt could also be of lasting significance… Shattering of belief within the dependability of 1’s rapid world means lack of belief in different individuals, who’re the transmitters and interpreters of that world. We’ve relied on the image of the world they’ve given us and it has proved mistaken; now we have turned for response in what we thought was a relation of mutuality and have discovered our expectation misinterpreted or distorted; now we have opened ourselves in anticipation of a response that was not forthcoming. With each recurrent violation of belief we develop into once more kids uncertain of ourselves in an alien world.
Within the the rest of On Disgrace and the Seek for Identification, Lynd goes on to discover examples of disgrace and its conciliation throughout the canon of Western literature, then examines the 2 natures of disgrace, what it provides in confronting the tragedy of life, and tips on how to suppose from elements to wholes. Couple it with Lynd’s up to date Karen Horney on the conciliation of our interior conflicts, then revisit Ellen Bass’s magnificent poem “The way to Apologize.”
