There is an intimate relation between shame and guilt in the analytical experience. When a subject is invited to say whatever comes to mind —that is, when they are called upon to engage in free association— what they say can arouse either one or the other of these affects: guilt for having kept certain things to themselves, or shame for having said certain other things. They may even feel guilty about what they have said and ashamed of the very things they have not spoken about.
Shame and guilt maintain a singular proximity to each other. Jacques-Alain Miller formulates the question precisely: “Why do shame and guilt refer to one another and yet remain distinct?” [1] These affects are not equivalent, although both arise when the subject stumbles upon a point of the real, precisely where they encounter the opacity of their own jouissance.
Let us recall that guilt is the subject’s response when jouissance appears in the form of the superegoic imperative and the renunciation of desire. In this way, guilt can arise both as the result of the prohibition of jouissance and under the imperative to enjoy even more. Shame, for its part, emerges when jouissance itself is exposed to the gaze of the Other and the subject falls short of the ideal image which supported their place. Both are forms of treating the real and for that very reason are constitutive of the social bond. The fate that a civilisation reserves for guilt and shame says a great deal about its way of making the bond with the Other exist. [2]
In Spanish, the word sinvergüenza denotes a scoundrel with extraordinary precision. He is not exactly a desvergonzado(one who is shameless). The desvergonzado still retains a relation with shame: he defies it, provokes it or plays with it. The sinvergüenza, on the other hand, seems to have freed himself from it. Our age seems to be characterised less by desvergüenza than by sinvergüencería—a form of subjectivity in which guilt, too, loses its efficacy.
Contemporary shamelessness, correlative to the imperative of jouissance, seems to promise a world liberated from both these affects. To say everything is equivalent to showing everything. There would thus be nothing left to hide and, consequently, nothing to forgive. In this way, the notions of honour, dignity or even truth have yielded to the right of everyone to enjoy themselves without limit.
The contemporary meaning of the expression “to say everything” does not refer to the coercion of confession, as might occur under the rule of a dictatorial regime, but to the permissiveness of jouissance, whose imperative might be formulated as follows: “Say whatever you like and you will continue to enjoy yourself and give enjoyment to others.” Social media constitutes the most obvious paradigm of this, although a certain degradation of political life also plays a part.
The fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, enunciated as “say whatever comes to mind,” is by no means an invitation to go on enjoying, but rather to open up the path to the unconscious and produce a knowledge of the enjoyment at stake in the very act of speaking. Contrary to the imperative meaning of “saying it all,” the aim is to devise a treatment of the real, which includes an ethics of jouissance. For this very reason, shame and guilt play their part in the course of an analytic treatment. It may even happen on occasion that psychoanalysis introduces the need for modesty into someone whose immodesty formed part of their symptom. On the other hand, the “saying well” to which an analysis can lead is not compatible with the urge to say everything, because it only comes about when the enunciation highlights the point at which there is no complete knowledge of jouissance and the subject invents a know-how with that impossibility.
Psychoanalysis, which is not a push towards confession, leads the subject to take responsibility for their own position. If we return to the title of our Congress, To Say It All?, we note that it is precisely the question mark that introduces the analytic logic: not only because there is a logical impossibility of saying it all, but because jouissance remains, at some point, always opaque. The experience of psychoanalysis lies, in a sense, in the ethical scope of that very questioning. One might ask, then, whether an analysis would be possible for a subject without guilt or shame. It does not seem so. Undertaking an analysis supposes taking shame and guilt into account, insofar as both emerge as affects that signify the subject’s relation to their jouissance, as well as their singular bond with the Other.
That said, nor could we affirm that guilt and shame have disappeared entirely; perhaps it would be better to ask what their place is today within the social bond, given that they seem to have lost the significance they once held. How are these affects reconfigured in a civilisation where the very idea of honour has been eroded? This is one of the questions that psychoanalytic discourse is well-placed to address, and, precisely for that reason, it is a topic that deserves to be explored in the ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and contemporary civilisation.
[1] Miller, J.-A., “On Shame,” in J. Clemens & R. Grigg (Eds.), Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 11-28.
[2] In addition to the article cited above, see also on this subject: Miller, J.-A., Pathologies de l’éthique. 2. Sur le sentiment de culpabilité, 1989. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyo3PJHBL1M
