Shame and the Making of Art: A Depth Psychological Perspective 9781138096608, 9781315105246

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title page
Copyright page
Table of contents
List of figures
Introduction
1 Research approach
2 Defining shame and its impacts
3 The art of assemblage
4 Approaching shame
5 Shame and self-expression: a heuristic study
6 Interpretive phenomenological analysis
7 Conclusions
References
Index

Citation preview

Shame and the Making of Art

Shame remains at the core of much psychological distress and can eventuate as physical symptoms, yet experiential approaches to healing shame are sparse. Links between shame and art making have been felt, intuited, and examined, but have not been sufficiently documented by depth psychologists. Shame and the Making of Art addresses this lacuna by surveying depth psychological conceptions of shame, art, and the role of creativity in healing, contemporary and historical shame ideologies, as well as recent psychobiological studies on shame. Drawing on research conducted with participants in three different countries, the book includes candid discussions of shame experiences. These experiences are accompanied by Cluff ’s heuristic inquiry into shame with an interpretative phenomenological analysis that focuses on how participants negotiate the relationship between shame and the making of art. Cluff ’s movement through archetypal dimensions, especially Dionysian, is developed and discussed throughout the book. The results of the research are further explicated in terms of comparative studies, wherein the psychological processes and impacts observed by other researchers and effects on self-­conscious maladaptive emotions are described. Shame and the Making of Art should be essential reading for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students engaged in the study of psychology and the arts. It will be of particular interest to psychologists, Jungian psychotherapists, psychiatrists, social workers, creativity researchers, and anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of this shame and self-­ expression. Deborah E. Cluff completed her PhD in Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, USA, in 2015.

Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies Series Advisor: Andrew Samuels Professor of Analytical Psychology, Essex University, UK.

For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/Research­in-Analytical-­Psychology-and-­Jungian-Studies/book-­series/JUNGIANSTUDIES. The Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies series features research-­focused volumes involving qualitative and quantitative research, historical/archival research, theoretical developments, heuristic research, grounded theory, narrative approaches, collaborative research, practitioner-­led research, and self-­study. The series also includes focused works by clinical prac­ titioners, and provides new research informed by explorations of the work of C. G. Jung that will appeal to researchers, academics, and scholars alike. Books in this series: Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language A Jungian Interpretation of the Linguistic Turn Bret Alderman Post-­J ungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut Golden Apples of the Monkey House Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

A Japanese Jungian Perspective on Mental Health and Culture Wandering Madness Iwao Akita Translated by Waka Shibata and Kittredge Stephenson Jung and Kierkegaard Researching a Kindred Spirit in the Shadows Amy Cook

Eros and Economy Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference Barbara Jenkins

Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali Leanne Whitney

Towards a Jungian Theory of the Ego Karen Evers-­F ahey

Shame and the Making of Art A Depth Psychological Perspective Deborah E. Cluff

Shame and the Making of Art

A Depth Psychological Perspective

Deborah E. Cluff

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Deborah E. Cluff The right of Deborah E. Cluff to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-09660-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10524-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

This work is dedicated to my family for all that has happened and all that will be. My father died while I was conducting this research. I hoped that he would live long enough to see it completed since I was doing it with the fantasy of gaining his ultimate approval. For some time his death took away my “something to prove” and I was left wondering what the point was, who would care? After two years of struggle to find meaning, I came back to the deeper, broader purpose: to make a difference for someone else who battles the demons of shame. The sincerest hope I have is that this confrontation with shame disrupts this generations-­old tradition. To Chloe: your angel soul saved my life. I would not have the heart I do without you to love. May you know freedom and joy and let your beautiful inside out; this world needs your unique expression.

Contents



List of figures



Introduction

viii 1

1 Research approach

13

2 Defining shame and its impacts

18

3 The art of assemblage

42

4 Approaching shame

51

5 Shame and self-­expression: a heuristic study

61

6 Interpretive phenomenological analysis

96

7 Conclusions

116



120 128

References Index

Figures

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9

Dissertation Council Curious Cat Dissertation Council Floating Female Dissertation Council Primitive Mask Active Imagination Corseted Woman Active Imagination Hats Wigs for Dionysus The Dummy and the Dancer Reassembled Music Box Master or Servant?

72 73 74 77 82 83 90 91 94

Introduction

Links between shame and the making of art have been felt, intuited, and even examined, but have not been sufficiently documented by depth psychologists, leaving us with a lack of robust research data to draw on for self-­directed study or clinical application. This research represents a unique contribution to the body of understanding shame and the making of art. Through a combination of literature review and phenomenological analyses, the book examines whether the making of assemblage art can help to re-­assemble the parts of self that have been lost to shame. A theoretical framework is provided to orient the reader to various definitions of shame. This framework is fleshed out by way of subjective experiments including a heuristic inquiry into shame, through encountering the archetypal Dionysus and the making of assemblage art. The primary aim of a heuristic investigation is to translate the researcher’s personal experiences into “a story that portrays the qualities, meanings, and essences of universally unique experiences” (Moustakas, 1990, p.  13). To accomplish this, the heuristic study is validated by a brief Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), consisting of a participant-­based assemblage art workshop. The IPA focused on how the relationship between shame and art making is negotiated in a group setting. The participant population included a diverse group of males and females from three different countries representing a range of ages between 20 and 56. Jungian Erich Neumann writes that though individual wounds reside in the personal unconscious, they resonate throughout the collective unconscious, implicating the resolution of one’s complexes in communal transformation (1959/1966, p. 157). No unified depth psychotherapeutic theory of shame, its sources and impacts, or a model of how to treat it exists. In 1992, affect theory pioneer Silvan Tompkins wrote that “scientific psychology and the mental health field” had failed to articulate the shame experience (Kaufman, 1992, p. ix). Since the time that was written, various psychological and neuroscientific studies have been conducted on shame, expanding our understanding of shame and confirming what many have long observed: shame is positively correlated to myriad psychological symptoms. This book views shame not

2   Introduction

only from a depth psychological perspective but also as an affective, social, and psychobiological experience; the assumption being that shame lives not only in the mental body but also in the emotional and physical bodies. Shame has a unique physiological response pattern as compared to other similar negative emotions. In Rohleder, Chen, Wolf, and Miller’s 2008 study, they reinforce the reality that, in addition to adverse psychological impacts, chronic shame can have detrimental physiological effects. Therefore, the shame experiments in this research are designed to include the body not as an organism apart from the mind but as a source of data to be accounted for. When aspects of a personality have been split off because of shame, channels of communication between the conscious and the unconscious are compromised. This impacts the capacity to know and to express one’s inner contents through art making. Furthermore, the energy siphoned off to keep the shamed contents unconscious reduces useable libidinal energy, which Jung believed could be transformed, amongst other things, into art (Jung, 1967). Jung included several references to shame and shamelessness in the Red Book indicating that he engaged with shame on some level related to his art. Assemblage art comprises unconventional materials and found objects that are assembled into three-­dimensional structures. Found objects invite the artist into novel experimentation; therefore assemblage art lends itself particularly well to “play, with neither a plan nor purpose,” which Marie-­Louise von Franz (1980) states is the best precondition to bring “unconscious matrix successfully over the threshold into consciousness” (p. 89). Assemblage artists give “more than a nod to the role of chance; that putting together seemingly unrelated objects in a spontaneous manner might yield previously undiscovered meaning” (Jung, von Franz, Henderson, Jacobi, & Jaffe, 1964, p.  298). Two important points have been made: that the creative process allows lost psychic content to emerge and that veiled meanings may be revealed. Neither Freud nor Jung developed comprehensive theories or treatment approaches to shame. Jungian James Shultz (2013) and other contemporary psychologists have speculated as to this “glaring omission,” postulating that both men had not resolved their own shame sufficiently to treat the subject. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Francis Broucek (1991, p.  110) writes that Freud focused too much emphasis on guilt and relegated shame to matters of sexuality. Shultz (2013) writes that Jung ignored shame except as it related to the original shame: the awareness of her/his nakedness. The precise reasons that shame was not more thoroughly examined cannot be definitively defined for Freud or Jung though conjectures have been made. The climate of the times and places their individual dispositions and theories began development: Victorian Europe. Said another way, shame may not have been perceived as clinically significant or maladaptive so as to warrant the focus of analysis. To put shame into the historical context of  psychoanalysis, in 1895 Sigmund Freud proposed that shame caused

Introduction   3

repression and was a result of being seen naked or having a defect exposed (Shultz, 2013). Specifically, Freud (1930/1961) wrote that shame was caused by the upright gait that exposed the human genitals (p.  99). In a later paper, he related shame to “genital deficiency,” deeming shame a feminine characteristic par excellence (1933/1964, p. 132). Freud also suggested that shame was a derivative of self-­reproach that resulted from early sexual experiences. Freud further described shame as a defense against exhibitionism and voyeurism, which he considered to be sexual drives. Broucek (1991, p. 110) refers to Freud’s notion that shame about sexuality is actually “false shame and prudishness” that maintained repression and led to neurosis. By modern definition, Freud’s concept of shame was that it was both affect and a defense against affect (Shultz, 2013). The core of Freud’s structural theory is centered on guilt and the Oedipus complex. Psychoanalyst and self-­psychologist Andrew Morrison (1998) conjectures that Freud didn’t study shame because of his own shame and secondary shame. In affect theorist Donald Nathanson’s (1992) extensive examination of shame, he grouped the defenses against shame into four main areas: withdrawal, avoidance (which can take many different forms), attacking others, and attacking the self. Per Shultz (2013), most of these correlate to the ego defense mechanisms of psychoanalysis. Morrison (1998) wrote that Freud did not focus on shame as a principal concern and that his view of shame was inconsistent and ill-defined. Much of what we know about Freud’s conceptualizations and treatment of shame was published posthumously and by analyses conducted within the field of psychology. Thus, post-­Freudians have written more about Freud’s relationship to shame than Freud wrote on shame altogether. Shultz (2013) presupposes that shame struck too close to Jung’s “personal vulnerabilities” and that secondary shame prevented further progress on the subject. Interestingly, in an essay on psychology and religion Jung writes, “Beneath all natural shyness, shame, and tact, there is a secret fear of the unknown ‘perils of the soul’ ” (1960, p. 15). Jung connects shame not only to human consciousness but also the unconscious. In this way, the shadow is connected to shame in that it resides in the unconscious until an event, such as enantiodromia, propels it to the surface. Enantiodromia is a compound of two Greek words: enantios (“opposite”) and dramein (“to run”). In Heraclitus’ philosophy, enantiodromia is the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite (Sharp, 1991). The rejected part of the self that is closest to the ego, which Jung named the “shadow,” is the dark part that needs to be integrated by the ego as part of individuation or in analysis. However, Shultz (2013) writes, “as far as I can tell, he never mentioned that the shadow was the shameful part.” In a seminar on Zarathustra, Jung (1934/1988) said: As long as man is in a merely instinctive animal condition, there is absolutely no ground for shame, no possibility of shame even, but with

4   Introduction

the coming of the ego consciousness, he feels apart from the animal kingdom and the original paradise of unconsciousness, and then naturally he is inclined to have feelings of inferiority. (p. 965) Here, a connection may be drawn between inferiority, the body, and shamelessness embodied by the archetypal Dionysus as being in conflict with civilized consciousness and the attendant shame experiences. Thus, each move toward consciousness is a move away from our original animal nature. One might observe that this stance closely resembles the Judeo-­ Christian view as well as Freud’s supposition. Both Freud and Jung weighed in on art and practiced art in their own right, though the use of art beyond free-­flowing associations, commentaries on esthetics, and Jung’s active imagination was not thoroughly explored for the purpose of the treatment or shame-­specific neuroses in analysis. Notwithstanding, the ideas, suppositions, and intimations made by Freud and Jung that art and creativity in general have therapeutic potential should not be overlooked. Though contemporary art therapy can trace its origins to both men, it must be said that their individual contributions were different in nature, character, and process. A major distinction between Freud and Jung is the way they approached inner images, particularly dream images. Where Freud’s approach fit the imagery into his psychoanalytic theory, Jung attempted to relate to the unconscious in its own right (Edwards, 1987, p.  93). Dr Erich Neumann (1959/1966) writes, “psychoanalysis attempts to derive creativity from a constitutional deficiency … an excess of libido,” which can be sublimated by “the creative man” but leaves him “fixated in childhood” (p.  157). Rollo May (1975) distinguished the regressive “infantile, archaic dreads, unconscious longings, and similar psychic contents” associated with creativity from the progressive aspect, which is characterized by “new meaning, new forms, new reality” as the integrative function of creativity. May claimed that the progressive aspect of creativity was omitted from Freud’s theories (p. 91). Of note, assemblage art is linked to the Surrealists who were influenced by Freud’s theories and were known to free associate, believing that it allowed their work to emerge from the subconscious; thus they were intentionally and decidedly psychological. Unanticipated by Freud, assemblage art often possesses such a psychological dimension. According to Jung, the collective unconscious is expressed through the personal unconscious and the personal unconscious is expressed through imagery. When we consider the totality of the human psyche, in which consciousness and the unconscious are interdependent both in their development and in their functions, we see that consciousness can develop only where it preserves a living bond with the creative powers of the unconscious (Neumann, 1959/1966, p.  172). Jung also referenced the utility of transforming libidinal energy into a

Introduction   5

creative work. In his essay, On Psychic Energy, Jung writes that a patient will remain at odds with her/himself (i.e., neurotic) until the symbol-­ making process can be used to transform libidinal energy into an effective work, as opposed to flowing along the old channels into archaic fantasies and activities (1928/1969b, p. 49). What Jung meant by “effective work” is somewhat left to interpretation. Looking at Jung’s discretionary activities, one can see that he spent significant time making art and creatively playing (e.g., the Red Book, his sculptural play at Bollingen). As written above, May’s examination of creativity identified that the integrative aspect yields “new meaning, new forms, new reality.” By this definition, assemblage art represents creativity’s progression as, in simple terms, it consists of transforming distinct objects into a novel art piece. The found objects are stripped of their original context, modified, and incorporated into a wholly new context to become part of a composite body. There is no true tabula rasa as assemblage art consists of myriad objects that are rife with projection potential. The role of projection in viewing objects, especially art, has not only been duly contemplated but it constitutes a common assumption—the meaning of an object is subject to the viewer. The artist had some interest in the object to begin with, otherwise it would not have been noticed, or at least not picked up and used in an assemblage piece. Regarding unknown psychic contents (i.e., projection) Jungian Marie-­Louise von Franz (1980) writes, “Before such a content is integrated into consciousness it will always appear physically” (p. 17). She goes on to write that we must consider the positive and the negative aspects of projection, stating that “the negative can be avoided if the man or the woman holds his or her ground against the thrust of the unconscious content and tries to become conscious of its meaning through reflection” (p. 17). Creating assemblage artwork provides such an opportunity to reflect on the chosen materials, what meanings are attributed to them, and to consciously encounter previously unconscious contents. In the sense that the objects used in assemblage art pre-­existed and were quite likely conceived in the imagination of another and made by yet an other (by nature, by human, or by machine), they carry meanings and histories unto themselves not just those that are projected upon them. This affords the artist the prospect of discovering the subjectivity of the object, coming into collaborative relationship with it.

Relevance to depth psychology A question that emerged from my clinical work and during the heuristic study was how art making can foster a relationship between conscious and unconscious contents. Using art as an avenue for healing (i.e., making the unconscious, conscious) has long been of interest to depth psychologists. Artists externalize aspects of psyche into observable phenomena, allowing

6   Introduction

the artist sufficient distance to attempt to view the thing in itself. Depth psychologists have commonly conceptualized art products as the externalization of repressed material and/or of projection. In that sense, the rise of repressed material and the projection of shadow material that occurs during art making takes shape in tangible form, potentially reducing or precluding the tendency to aim such psychic contents at another person, culture, religion, race, or even reflected back at the self, all of which clearly have gravely destructive potential, even if those contents appear as idealizations. In her essay on modern art in Man and His Symbols, Jungian Aniela Jaffe (Jung et al., 1964) writes: the artists, like the alchemists, probably did not realize that they projected their own darkness, their earthly shadow, a psychic content that they and their time had lost and “abandoned” onto matter. As such, it is “psychological fact” that objects are receptacles for human projection, devoid of their own subjectivity. (p. 292) This represents the prevailing attitude toward objects; their value is tied solely to human utility. In contrast, this study views objects as bodies that carry both objective and subjective meaning. Furthermore, the servile view of objects relates to overall cultural beliefs about matter—that it is subordinate to spirit. Von Franz (1980) writes that adults lose their ability to fantasy play because they become too convinced that the object is inanimate; however, the “archaic identity of subject and object still lives at the very bottom of our psyche” (p. 8). Rather than deeming this primitive lower layer as less valuable, it should be recognized as the place where the “real secret of all life-­intensity and cultural creativity lies. It is simply the normal condition that produces all our affective ‘magic’ ties to people and objects” (p.  8). Jaffe quotes influential Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky who imbues the object with more subjectivity: Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street.… Everything has a secret soul that is silent more often than it speaks. (Jung et al., 1964, p. 292) Kandinsky (1866–1944), who is considered by many to be the father of abstract modern art—a nonobjective painter, wrote extensively about his reflections on art and its meaning and purpose. He was interested in the spiritual nature of art. If taken as psychic manifestations, art allows us to observe without being reflected back to, or caught, by another set of human

Introduction   7

eyes. In making our own art, we are voyeur and witness to our inner, sometimes unconscious, dimensions. It should be stated that the modern artist can express many things unconsciously and without riling hostility, things that are resented when expressed by a psychologist (Jung et al., 1964, p.  320). Thus, approaching this study not purely as objective witness and reporter, but as a researcher-­participant, offers the possibility for content to be expressed that might not be otherwise. These suppositions are generally known and accepted in the field of depth psychology, but they are reiterated here for the sake of establishing a depth psychological perspective.

Clinical origins of the topic Though the primary evidence presented in this research is primarily self-­ study, clinical work with patients forms its root structure. Note that this research is stimulated by, but not based on, case studies. The clinical information is historical and represents a retrospective of my work with patients. While working as a clinician, my patient population consisted of men and women between the ages of 21 and 45 representing African-­ American, Asian-­American, European-­American, and Latin-­American heritages. We worked within a standard therapeutic frame; meaning patients voluntarily attended 50-minute sessions on a weekly basis. The shared characteristics of primary concern consisted of well-­developed splitting defenses, difficulty differentiating between the concrete and the abstract (e.g., symbol formation), terror of psychic space (i.e., void, emptiness), belief in a tyrannical external power source (e.g., God, the universe), compulsive perfectionism, severe emotional risk-­aversion, and underdeveloped internal structures to mediate between extreme poles of experience. I address the patient population as a whole because of the uncanny similarities regarding these issues across gender and ethnicity. Expanding on the theme of perfectionism, an aspect of the patients’ psyches demanded that they be perfect according to an idealized image of what they thought they should be. This presented them with a double bind as co-­existed with the truism that objective perfection is an unattainable goal for any living being. This incommensurable paradox combined with the other psychological conditions listed above produced a self-­image based in feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, masochism, ruin, and hopelessness. In short, the belief system operated as such: perfection is good; imperfection is bad: I am imperfect so I am bad. The core belief could be surmised as: I am fundamentally bad. This is the basis of shame. In what I interpreted as efforts to transcend unwanted feelings and to negotiate the relationship between the conscious personality and the un-­ realized and/or unconscious aspects, patients sought to achieve dissociative states. These states presented opportunities to experience and express parts of themselves that they would not generally enact in non-­dissociative states—the

8   Introduction

shameful parts. Some patients seized the opportunity inherent in dissociation to escape the body, to become numb, to go away from the present situation, to transcend the body’s weighty reality and earthly limitations. Those who reached transcendent, disembodied states would likely undo this excess by engaging in what could be considered bad, damaging, lowly body-­centered behaviors (e.g., substance abuse, binge eating, unsafe sex). Irrespective of the mode, these enactments were followed by intense regret, guilt, and most profoundly, shame. This might be conceptualized from an archetypal perspective as a battle between matter, the physical body, typically seen as feminine and “lower,” and spiritual morality and reason, which are typically affiliated with masculine establishment and the “higher” aspects of humanity (Evans, 1988, p.  52). Predictably, intense negative feelings perpetuated these cyclical patterns, giving the patient the hopeless belief that there was no way out; no choice but to remain tied to the unending swing of the pendulum. A critical construct missing from the paradigm they were living in was psychological complexity and a way to consciously experience embodiment. For these patients, embracing liminality was purely abstract or, if grasped, a petrifying idea. The concept of the “middle way” came to me through studies in Tibetan Buddhism. Since I knew its merits and potential in therapy, I brought some of its tenets into the treatment, such as cultivating mindfulness and practicing equanimity. At that time, I understood Buddhism as the chief alternative to the strictly dualistic doctrine of Judeo-­Christianity as well as the medical model—both of which had proven to be limiting and unhelpful in alleviating many of the psychological symptoms my patients suffered from. What I now think of as “Buddhism-­Lite” was the only non-­Western set of ideas I had to offer in the face of such an entrenched, daunting dualistic structure. It soon became starkly apparent that not only was I suggesting a nearly impossible undertaking, but I was also steering them toward another body of religion whose goal was to transcend, to attain enlightenment, which triggered the drive to perfection and to escape being the instinctual animal body. Being in liminal space, in-­between, requires holding paradoxes while being aware that there is an entity doing the holding simultaneously. Holding space implies that there is a seaworthy container, a coherent self that keeps its central place and can navigate the strong pull of polarity. In the case of some patients, there was nobody at the helm with sufficient ego strength to withstand fragmentation. I was asking them to go somewhere that was a hopeful mirage at best, as being in the void, sitting with the body, and deprivation from external distractions was perdition. In addition, the Western idea of “I” does not exist in the Buddhist view. While de-­ centralizing the “I” or relativizing the ego might be beneficial to certain psychological conditions and states; for this action to be cogent, an identifiable “I” must already exist. In the case of patients contending with unconscious psychic fragments, this concept proved too destabilizing for

Introduction   9

some, a bypass opportunity for others, and immaterial to others, due to its radically different perspective. Attempts to follow my well-­intended but ignorant promptings to “be more present” were not grasped as I had expected and led to perceived failure and subsequent self-­punishment when these venerated states were not achieved. In some cases, the patient was “successful” in practicing mindfulness meditation; however, at times even that success was a veiled failure. What was achieved was another form of splitting, a type of dissociation—spiritual bypass—that appears to be “good” as it ascends toward the spirit realm and transcends the body (i.e., the bad, earthly, animal realm). When people are flying high above the fray of worldly effects, they do not always willingly come down. When they do come down, the opposing pole can come immediately into play. I needed a radically different way of seeing the problems presented. I came to believe that I needed to first create corporeal, embodied yet also liminal, fluid space in my own life. In that search, I discovered that the act of assemblage art making represented an intermediary between opposites, which could elicit all forms of contents to arise. The investigation that led me to the current research topic is described in the ensuing heuristic study.

Jungian terms and theory One difficulty with employing Jung’s ideas and terms faithfully are the contradictions that are prevalent throughout his prolific writings. Changes in his opinions, especially over time, express varying viewpoints, some antithetical to his previous assertions. This study consigns selected concepts purported by Jung to discussion points rather than qualifying their validity. Because this is a depth psychological study, pertinent terms and concepts are clarified or defined. Note that the “collective unconscious” is used interchangeably with the “objective psyche” and the “personal unconscious” interchangeably with the “subjective psyche” as they have the same qualitative meaning (Jung, 1917/1928, p. 66). The following is a discussion of and rationale for the deliberate uses and omissions of Jung’s ideas germane to this study. In his writings, Jung purposefully distinguished a lower-­case “self ” from an upper-­case “Self.” In reference to a discussion of archetypes (discussed here as scintillae), Jung (1954/1969a) writes that one is set apart as a “scintilla perfecta Unici Potentis ac Fortis” (p.  192), which he compares with other supreme images, including Christ. Though he writes this “in passing” (p. 192) he makes the statement that this “one”, the image of the One Scintilla, is a symbol of the Self, psychologically speaking. Here Jung establishes his belief in the primacy of the singular self and perfection. Marie-­Louise von Franz (Jung et al., 1964) describes Jung’s concept of the Self as the organizing center that is also thought of as the inventor and the source of dream material; she goes on to write that Jung thought of the Self as the totality of the psyche so that it could be distinguished from the

10   Introduction

ego, which he considered to be a small part of this totality. The Self, she writes, is an “inner guiding factor” that can only be understood “through the investigation of one’s own dreams” (p. 161). The ego’s role is to recognize the material from the unconscious and bring it into reality. For the purposes of this study, the Jungian concept of the capital “S” Self is tabled as the speculative nature of the term and its role in the life of the individual connotes a metaphysical discussion that is beyond the scope of this research. This study does not assume that the “Self ” is the source of inner guidance, dreams, or any unconscious material. The source, if there were to be one, is not identified as being other­worldly or spiritually derived in any sense; rather, this study does not attempt to ascertain a source beyond the conscious “I,” the personal unconscious, and the objective psyche. In this study, the word self is used in lay terms, which is defined as “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action” (“self ”). Unless otherwise specified, the term self will be used in this context and written in lower case unless grammar requires capitalization or to keep to the integrity of any quoted material. For Jungians, individuation is thought to be the aim of human psychic development. Von Franz (Jung et al., 1964, p. 163) compares individuation to the growth of a tree; wherein, the seed “contains the whole future of the tree in latent form.” As the goal of the seed is to become a specific, fully realized tree, the goal of individuation is the human realization of this uniqueness. “Like the tree, we should give into this almost imperceptible, yet powerfully dominating impulse—an impulse that comes from the urge toward unique, creative self-­realization.” These impulses, she writes, come from the Self, not the ego, and that though we may share commonalities with others, we must find our own unique expression (p. 167). Barriers to individuation are myriad and include, in part, psychic splits or the repression of psychic contents, which form Jung’s idea of the “shadow.” This study is less interested in individuation as a goal or culmination of human effort; it is however, interested in psychic activities that are heavily associated with shame, though links between these defenses and shame were not made explicit by Freud or Jung. The shadow comprises split off and repressed contents, it is made up of hidden unconscious aspects of oneself. To use alchemical metaphor, it contains the prima materia (also referred to as shit) wherein gold can be found (Wikman, 2004, p. 127). The shadow is thought of as the other in us. To become conscious of it involves acknowledging the reality of the dark aspects of the personality. When the shadow is willfully repressed it continues in the unconscious and expresses itself indirectly and sometimes dangerously. In Jung’s essay The Conjunction he writes: the process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which

Introduction   11

we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted. (1955/1970, p. 702) In Psychology and Religion (1970) he further clarifies his concept of the shadow by characterizing it as “merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!” Von Franz expands Jung’s use of the term shadow to not only include unknown attributes of the ego that belong mainly to the personal realm but also to contain collective elements (Jung et al., 1964, Chapter 3, p. 174). Central to Jungian theory is the idea of the tension of opposites. However, inferences made by Jung threaten the theory of opposites he advocated. Jungian Lucy Huskinson (2004) writes that for Jung, the height of human potential is the realization of the whole self; “the cultivation and balance of all antithetical psychological impulses—both rational and irrational—within the personality: the dynamic syntheses of Apollonian and Dionysian” (p.  3). To clarify, Plutarch contrasted the Dionysiac and Apollonian in art whereby the “Apolline represents uniformity, orderliness, and unmixed seriousness; and the Dionysian: playfulness, aggressiveness, seriousness, and frenzy” (Seaford, 2006, p.  143). No god or goddess of the pantheon represents polycentricity, paradox, and transformation more acutely than the archetypal Dionysus. “The Dionysian archetype predisposes a man (or woman) to the possibility of psychological dismemberment or crucifixion, caused by his inability to reconcile powerful opposites within” (Bolen, 1989/2014, p.  261). Learning to manage life’s paradoxes is highly beneficial particularly to a person who is prone to dissociation and splitting under stress and, for many, this constitutes a valid purpose. Jungian Sandra Edelman (1998, p. 58) also refers to Greek mythology, looking to the goddess Athene as having the ability reconcile paradoxes such as shame and creative expression. She writes that Athene embodies creativity through her inventiveness, which gives her the ability to conceptualize something new from the old and to call on the many facets of her self. For Edelman, Athene walks the line, balancing opposites, representing practical movement and psychological creativity: she has the capacity to unify opposites. Huskinson asserts the view that opposites are incommensurable and incapable of uniting to form a whole; they remain, at all times, in a relationship defined by contradiction. This study treats opposites not as objective realities but as one way to conceptualize psychic activity. Jung’s concepts of Self, individuation, shadow, and tension of the opposites can all be recognized in the archetypal Dionysus. Scholar Paul Bishop (1995) writes:

12   Introduction

the phenomenon of the Dionysian is discussed throughout Jung’s writings in various ways—as a manifestation of Jungian (i.e., sexual and extrasexual) libido, as a psychological type, as the source of artistic inspiration, as Wotan, and as a component of the Self. (p. 17) Many have credited Friedrich Nietzsche’s phenomenology of the Dionysian as heavily influencing Jung and as an important precursor to depth psychology. Bishop (1995) presupposes that Jung’s interest in Dionysus was partly an “attempt to find a psychological solution to the contemporary crisis in religion;” then he goes on to state, “Jung’s uniquely Nietzschean solution lay in the construction of a Dionysian Self which, through the dialectic of consciousness and the Unconscious, permits the Ego to die and be reborn anew” (p. 17). Redemption for Jung consists of overcoming the ego and the attainment of the Self, which is demonstrated by the “transformations of desire (libido) into creativity” (p. 120). A point of contention for Jung was whether polycentricity is native or pathological to the psyche. The idea of polycentricity was touched upon in Jung’s writings where he acknowledges both the natural presence of multiplicity whilst warning against fragmentation of the personality. As a progenitor of archetypal psychology, James Hillman (1975) asserted that Western psychology does not address the many-­sidedness of the soul as it overvalues unity, a concept set forth by monotheistic religion (e.g., Judeo-­ Christianity). As such, he suggested that a successful psychology must adopt an archetypal perspective that recognizes the polycentricity of the soul and implicates us in a “revolution of consciousness—from monotheistic to polytheistic” (p. 35). That is to say, multiplicity can be understood as a natural tendency rather than solely as an aberration to be pathologized or viewed as a threat to the development of a unified, authentic self as purported by Jung’s dream of unification. Hillman (1975) writes, “through multiplicity we become internally more separated; we become aware of distinct parts.” Archetypal psychology maintains that, though amplifying and personifying the split off aspects of self appears to be a disintegrative process, formulating and naming the shunned aspects of self allows for the conscious expression of certain qualities that might otherwise remain largely inaccessible. Greek scholar Ruth Padel (1995) writes that the Greeks considered emotions as “wandering, autonomous, daemonic, outside forces” (p. 8). Normal consciousness comprises “inner and outer multiplicity” (Padel, 1995, p.  14). What cannot be contained in an either/or, or even a both/and, system might find its place in a wholly new container, outside the self. This is a polytheistic view of the psyche.

Chapter 1

Research approach

The research approach is based in the following philosophical postulates, which are in accordance with those of Pacifica Graduate Institute at large: it acknowledges the reality of the unconscious, it recognizes the complexity, fluidity, and ambiguity of psychic phenomenon, and respects many ways of knowing (Coppin & Nelson, 2005). As such, this research comprises a qualitative inquiry as opposed to an empirical study. As a field, depth psychology does not limit unconscious phenomena to the personal realm but expands its reaches to include all phenomena throughout human experience—ongoing as well as in the past; giving us the concepts of the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious (Jung, 1954/1969a, p. 166). Not only does depth psychology accept the hypothesis of the collective unconscious, but it also asserts that the objective psyche has autonomy; that is to say, phenomena may originate in the unconscious and occur beyond the control of the person experiencing it. Per Jung’s analytical psychology, autonomous complexes are thought to be at the core of the creative process and thereby art (van den Berk, 2012, p.  31). Archetypal psychologist James Hillman contributes his own perspective to Jung’s concept of the autonomy of the psyche. Reading Hillman (2000) and listening to his lectures his loyalty to the images could be felt; he expressed when he implored, “sticking to the image,” as a means to avoid wrongful interpretation (p. 173). To respect that postulate, the researcher limits psychological and artistic interpretations of the creative products included in this dissertation. Rather, this study focuses on the process of creating assemblage art; specifically, it details the process of choosing, or being chosen by, the objects; the assembling of pieces; the inner dialogue that occurs between the artist and her/himself; as well as dialogue between the art and the artist. This study examines assemblage art as collaboration between the found objects that comprise the assemblage pieces and the artist with the intention of personifying the artwork and its components. Per Hillman, “Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field” (p. 13). Regarding the utility of personification in this study, “Personifying helps place subjective experiences ‘out

14   Research approach

there’; thereby we can devise protections against them and relations with them” (p. 31). It is a manner of fleshing out one’s inner contents “Because our psychic stuff is images, image-­making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-­making” (p.  23). Though not overt, this study implements the alchemical-­hermeneutic approach that was developed by depth psychologist Robert Romanyshyn (2007) in that it is “research with soul in mind,” which is “a process of re-­turning to and remembering what has already made its claim upon the researcher through his or her complex relations to the topic” (p. xi); it is “about finding what has been lost, forgotten, neglected, marginalized, or otherwise left behind” (p. xi). These concepts are particularly befitting when conducting a study of assemblage art, which is typically composed using found objects—objects that have been discarded by one party and recovered by another.

Research methodology These presuppositions asserted in the above description of the research approach require the use of a qualitative research method that is oriented toward subjectivity and takes seriously a range of psychic phenomena (Smith, 2008). This study’s methodology draws from multiple methods of inquiry so as to engender the dialectal relationships between the researcher, the participants, and the artwork. Because this study presupposes that the creative process and its art products (i.e., the assemblage pieces) relate to psychic material, it necessitates an approach and, thereby, a methodology that considers such research data as valid. Using both heuristic and IPA methods provides the opportunity to explore the topic with greater depth and breadth. The modern development of phenomenology is attributed largely to German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and French existentialist Maurice Merleau-­Ponty (1908–1961). Husserl is said to be the founder of phenomenology, the study of a thing in itself, which comprises methods of describing phenomena as they appear, as well as to apprehend understanding and knowledge through intuition or inner evidence. Merleau-­ Ponty, who was heavily influenced by Husserl, challenged the dualistic Cartesian model that predominates Western thinking through the concepts of the lived body and nonduality, arguing that our philosophical tradition too frequently conceives of the body as an object whose purpose is to carry out tasks for the transcendent mind. Both Husserl (1950/1969) and Merleau-­ Ponty (1945/1962) asserted that total objectivity is impossible because an observing field is created wherein, the researcher encounters reciprocity of perception, an exchange between the body and environment, and the limitation of perspective. Phenomenological research asks that the researcher describe, as accurately as possible, the lived experience, or phenomenon, of the research participants (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009). “A phenomenological study … is one that focuses on descriptions of what people experience and

Research approach   15

how it is that they experience what they experience” (Patton, 1990, p. 71). More specifically, IPA is an approach to psychological qualitative research that focuses on the subjective experiences of a particular person (or group), in a particular context, attempting to makes sense of an identified phenomenon. The phenomenal subject matter generally holds personal significance for the researcher and the participant(s). IPA can be distinguished from other qualitative, phenomenological research methods because of its combination of psychological, interpretative, and idiographic components. As a way into the work, the research subject usually engages the researcher before the study methods and the participants are selected (Romanyshyn, 2007). In this case, the research design was derived directly from my life; therefore, my experience and imagination figure prominently in all aspects of this study. To make this involvement and influence explicit, a heuristic study, as formulated by psychologist Clark Moustakas (1990) is the primary source of data. Moustakas’ method was selected because, although its basis is autobiographical, it acknowledges that questions that matter personally usually have important social significance as well. This idea is in keeping with a concept of interplay between multiple layers of meaning, between the personal and the collective, the conscious and the unconscious. Using a heuristic method to examine the creative process allows the researcher to act as both creator of art pieces, witness to such psychic activity, and investigator into possible meanings. The validation portion of the heuristic study, the IPA, examined how participants negotiate the relationship between shame and artistic expression in a guided assemblage art workshop. This workshop occurred over the course of three consecutive days in a private art studio.

Workshop pedagogy The pedagogical approach used in the study workshop is based on Julie Garlen Maudlin’s 2006 work Teaching Bodies: Curriculum and Corporeality, which defines the concept of “embodied curriculum.” Embodied curriculum accounts for the transactional relationships between the educator’s body, the learner’s body, and the space wherein they work. Embodied curriculum “sees” the body and brings it fully into the learning process, which is comprised of the following three elements: disclosure, dialogue, and discomfort (Maudlin, 2006, p. 122). She borrows from Bronwen Levy’s 2000 work Pedagogy: Incomplete, Unrequited when she writes: embodied curriculum draws us into intimacy with the sensual, unruly, unpredictable, desirous body; it is a curriculum that recognizes the connections between materiality and the psychic world, between social and cultural conditions and circumstances, between desires and pleasures, as well as disappointments.

16   Research approach

Since shame is experienced most unmistakably in the body, due to identifiable psychophysiological responses and postures, the assemblage workshop was designed with these tenets in mind.

Gathering participant data Research data was collected via pre- and post-­workshop questionnaires designed to ascertain the participants’ shame experiences related to art making before the workshop and during the process workshop. The purpose of the pre-­workshop questionnaire was to establish baseline conditions, to stir the memories and imaginations of the participants, and prepare them for the type of information sought for in the study. These pre-­ written questions were also posed to form a basis for discovering patterns and correlations between respondents. These questions were intended to guide rather than dictate the ensuing research process. The post-­workshop questionnaire was intended to record any changes in their relationship to shame and art making. The participants were given an opportunity to add any additional information or reflections not specifically asked for on the post-­workshop questionnaire. Data was also collected through observation and photographing the art making process, the pieces in progress, as well as the final artworks during the workshop. To reiterate, the intent was not to analyze or critique the works but to enrich the content and contextualize the research conclusions. Therefore, images and detailed descriptions of the artwork created by the participants are not included herein.

Gathering heuristic data This data was gathered by first hand account of the dialectical relationship between shame and creative self-­expression. The data includes autobiographical and anecdotal information that is germane to the study of this subject, experiments with expression and shame triggers during the research development process, and the discovery of assemblage art as a means to come into contact with shame. This account generally follows Moustakas’ (1990, pp.  27–37) phases of heuristic inquiry, which are as follows: initial engagement, immersion, incubation, illumination, explication, creative synthesis, and validation. The validation portion consists of the participant study.

Data analysis Research in depth psychology may be inclusive of the sciences, philosophy, literature, the arts, and the humanities if that information helps to support, explicate or corroborate a study’s conclusions. Art-­based data provides evidence for this study; notwithstanding, due to the inherent subjectivity of

Research approach   17

art-­based data, it is not intended to demonstrate empirical fact. Qualitative data was used exclusively in this study because it allowed me to demonstrate the highly subjective material that this study explores. As discussed previously, analysis of the art-­based data is largely limited to participants’ reports of creating assemblage pieces as opposed to interpretations. Discussions of the assemblage pieces are incorporated, as appropriate, to support assertions and findings. The psychological aspects of this study are viewed primarily from the depth and archetypal perspectives postulated by Carl Jung, James Hillman and other post-­Jungian psychologists. The methodology chosen for this study is appropriate to thematic analysis as material that emerges during the workshop process is focused on how the participants perceive shame experiences related to creating artwork in the presence of others. The responses provided in the questionnaires is the fundamental data used for IPA portion of the study. In addition to gleaning understanding of each participant’s idiosyncratic experiences, the responses were also reviewed to identify any prevalent themes that occurred with in the group.

Ethical considerations The utmost reverence to both the letter and the spirit of ethical codes is imperative throughout the process and final published product of this research. All of the selected potential participants received a brief summary of the topic, preparation questions, and an explanation of the proposed study process before committing to participate. Participants received, reviewed, and signed informed consent forms before the workshop. The participants were informed both verbally and in writing that participation is voluntary and there would be no remuneration. Additionally, they were assured that their confidentiality would be protected. The participants were informed that they were not required to disclose any information and, at any time until the dissertation was complete, could retract any or all contributions. The participants were informed as to the extent that confidentiality would be provided and that all efforts would be made to reduce or eliminate harm, both psychological and physical. Every effort to comply with the American Psychological Association (APA) standards for conducting research with human participants was made. The research had the potential to be psycho-­activating, actuating unconscious material in unexpected ways; so sensitivity to emotional distress was requisite. As examined in detail in the literature review, exposure plays a strong role in shame. The participants were assured that in the event of distress (e.g., intolerable shame) they could terminate the workshop process at any point. As a depth psychologist and wounded researcher, intent on researching with soul in mind, one is ethically bound to be aware of and accept responsibility for the shadow that is inevitably cast upon the work (Romanyshyn, 2007).

Chapter 2

Defining shame and its impacts

“One’s knowledge of shame is often limited to the trace it leaves” (M. Lewis, 1992, p. 34). Helen Block Lewis, one of the first psychoanalysts to write about shame, encapsulates shame’s legacy of evading a ubiquitous definition. The absence of a robust examination of shame in the depth psychological literature combined with a lack of unanimity in the mental health field overall yields a too narrow and insubstantial understanding of the subject. There are various speculations about the origins and causes of shame: whether it is rooted in the family system or if it has a biological basis has not been definitively determined, but the link between shame and negative impacts on the self hold up across diverse populations and a range of measurement methods. To portray the complexity of shame and establish a context for phenomenon of shame, this chapter presents various definitions of shame, a brief history of attitudes and beliefs about shame, psychological theories of shame, and contemporary shame research. As evidenced by the publication of several books on the topic, shame has experience a surge of interest in 1990s. Jungian Mario Jacoby (1991) wrote that “shame prepares the ground for severe pathologies of every kind, from completely asocial to destructively addictive behaviors” (p. 51). In 1992, psychologist and affect theory pioneer Silvan Tompkins wrote that “scientific psychology and the mental health field” had failed to articulate the shame experience (Kaufman, 1992, p.  ix). Dr. Vicki Underland-­Rosow (1995), a social worker and human systems expert, also weighed in on shame during the 1990s, a decade that saw an invigorated interest in the subject. To place shame in a more-­than-personal context, she identified shame-­promoting systems including Christianity, education, politics, economics, and the helping professions (pp. 95–110). In the past couple of decades, shame has made a comeback and numerous psychological publications have come out offering new ideas and some reiterating and updating older shame schemas. Contemporary psychological, psychosocial, and psychobiological studies confirm what many have long observed: “shame is a pathogenic force” (Broucek, 1991, p.  4). Shame is positively correlated to myriad psychological symptoms, including: depres-

Defining shame and its impacts   19

sion, anxiety, eating disorders, personality disorders, suicidal behavior, self-­injury, and substance abuse (Leary & Tangney, 2010). In addition to adverse psychological impacts, chronic shame can have detrimental physiological effects. In his book on trauma, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) reports that neuroscience continues to identify correlations between brain activity and psychological phenomena: shame can be observed in brain scans (p.  102). It is apparent that furthering our understanding of shame and how to come into healing contact with it matters gravely to human well-­being. Shame is both a noun and a verb. Etymologically, when traced to its Indo-­European root, (s)kam, it means to hide or cover. Several sources cite the following attributions with slight variations: the noun is derived from Old English sc(e)amu: a feeling of guilt or disgrace; German cognates scams or scham; and Old Norse skǫmm. The verb is derivative of the noun from Old English sc(e)amian; Middle English schamen, shamien: to be ashamed. The Greek language made a distinction between aiskhyne: the negative shame of dishonor; and aidos: the positive shame of modesty. In Western Judeo-­Christian culture, shame can be traced back to Genesis: the first book in the Old Testament. The biblical view is that Adam and Eve lived naked and free of self-­consciousness until Eve was seduced by the snake (i.e., Satan) and ate the fruit that God warned was forbidden. Upon tasting the fruit, Adam and Eve both recognized their nudity as sinful, intrinsically connecting shame with both the body and wrongdoing (Blakemore & Jennett, 2008). Professor of Philosophy Robert Metcalf (2006) writes that philosophers as early as the Christian theologian Augustine (354–430) have looked to Genesis to ascertain shame’s origin and moral significance. Metcalf surmises that Augustine’s focus on a conflict between the spirit (or will) and the unwilling flesh constituted his definition of shame: “… Augustine thinks that shame originated in our progenitors’ consciousness of their disobedient genitals”; it is “unwilled arousal” that induces shame (2006, pp.  3–4). However, cultural antecedents can be found in ancient Greece where shame was also linked to the body; in Homer’s tales, shame was related to nakedness and sexuality. Blakemore and Jennett (2008) tied shame to physical vulnerability based on a reading of Homer’s Odyssey, citing shame as the “dread of being seen naked or making love, or witness love-­making.” They also indicate that this may relate to fear of being seen unfavorably, or other than one wants to be seen, in the eyes of others—mortal or divine. In the heroic culture of ancient Greece, Blakemore and Jennett conjecture that shame may be affiliated with appearing primitive, undignified, and lacking in the valued virtues of the time. There was a prevailing belief that crudeness would place humans closer to animal than divinity in the eyes of the gods. It is evident that shame has been located within the lower realms on a vertical axis of cultural values (i.e., spirit over matter, divine over animal).

20   Defining shame and its impacts

Shame and gender According to clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman (1992), differential patterning of gender socialization results in feminine and masculine gender scripts that govern identity, stratify, and shape interpersonal relations. These gender scripts become ideologies that “embody values and injunctions by evaluating what is good and what is bad.” Affect theorist Silvan Tomkins writes that they “embody sanctions, positive ones for the fulfillment of central values and negative ones for their violation” (1987a, p. 170). To summarize the predominant scripted roles for women and for men in American culture: women should express the effects of distress, fear, enjoyment, and shame; they should search for identity through relationships; and should be popular and conform (Kaufman, 1992, p.  206). Generally, women have a higher incidence of shame and often focus their shame on their physical appearance (Brown, 2012). Men should express the effects of excitement, anger, dis-­smell, disgust, and contempt; they should express the need for power and differentiation; they should compete, succeed, be independent, and be self-­sufficient (Kaufman, 1992, p. 209). Jungian Anita Greene presupposes that, due to our expectations of men in a patriarchal culture, they tend to demonstrate contempt as a defense against shame (Greene, 2015). This obfuscates the presence of shame and its important in the emotional lives of men who demonstrate this defensive structure. In 2011, Mary Ayers wrote Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine, one of the only depth psychological books that differentiates masculine shame from feminine shame. Ayers discusses these differences from an archetypal perspective: masculine shame is not male specifically (just as feminine shame is not limited to females), but is, rather, a type of shame that belongs to the masculine engendered collective psychic reality called patriarchy and its consequent gender images of male and female. (2011, p. xii) Ayers writes cultivation of the succubus: a demonic feminine figure that steals mens’ potency, is nonnatural as it is a shame reaction by the masculine for removing the role of the feminine in from the Judeo-­Christian creation myth. In other words, monotheism’s God creates humans without a maternal counterpart, resulting in the invocation of shame in men; this shame is projected and personified as the succubus. Ayers examines feminine shame in Judeo-­Christian culture through the biblical Lilith and Eve, the wives of Adam. According to Hebrew versions of Genesis, Lilith is said to be the first wife of Adam, created at the same time and of the same substance and equal to him in stature. It should be noted that her origins may be in Babylonian demonology and had many incarnations throughout

Defining shame and its impacts   21

history. Despite interpretations across time and space, Lilith represents dark feminine power that refuses to submit to masculine dominance. She is cast out and replaced by Eve who is created as a support figure for Adam and created from his rib—arguably one of the more dispensable structures in the human body. For Ayers (2011, pp. 9–10) these two wives represent the “shame spectrum of women … Eve appears as completely subordinate … while Lilith refuses the lower position.” Ayers (2011) speculates that Freud and Jung had unconscious relationships to the feminine gender and refers not only to the extramarital affairs of both men but to their complex relationships with Sabina Spielrein. Jung is known to have had an inappropriate exploitative sexual relationship with Spielrein when she was in treatment and sought advisement from Freud. Spielrein eventually became a psychoanalyst and published work in her own right; notably, her 1911 paper, Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being. Her work went largely unacknowledged and was dismissed by Jung and Freud; however, both men are thought to have appropriated her ideas, especially her concept of the destructive drive. Ayers views this as a projection of the negative anima—a devaluation of the feminine.

The shame experience Part of what defines shame is its distinctive physical gestures or notable inhibition thereof. Tomkins (1963) identified nine affects. He labeled two of them as positive affects: interest-­excitement and enjoyment-­joy; one as a neutral affect: surprise-­startle; and six as negative affects: fear-­terror, distress-­anguish, anger-­rage, dis-­smell, disgust, and shame-­humiliation. He formulated the primary affects by notating distinct patterns of facial and body expression that he observed in infants. Affects may be loosely defined physiological events occurring involuntarily as a response to stimulus. According to Tomkins’ discoveries, the body manifests shame in the following ways: it tends to crumple and sink and is momentarily awkward, the head drops, the gaze is downcast, blood vessels dilate in the face (i.e., blushing), and there is a temporary mental disorganization so that one cannot think logically or clearly. Kaufman (1992), who expanded affect theory’s understanding of shame, writes “Sustained eye contact with others becomes intolerable; the head is hung, spontaneous movement is interrupted, and speech is silenced” (p. 9). These depictions are consistent with multitudinous descriptions of shame’s physical and behavioral expressions; in other words, there is agreement that these are observable shame indicators. Several studies on whether these nonverbal behaviors are recognized in countries throughout Europe, as well as in Africa, India, Japan, and Turkey have been conducted, concluding that shame is reliably identified by observers across cultures (Haidt & Keltner, 1999; Harker & Keltner, 1998). A more recent, geographically specific study determined a strong

22   Defining shame and its impacts

correlation between American, Israeli, and Indian evaluations of shame, its displays, and what scenarios would elicit shame (Sznycer et al., 2016). What might also be considered in addition to objective, externalized or behavioral shame indicators are the subjective, internal indicators as they occur concomitantly. Kaufman (1992) poignantly describes, “the binding effect of shame,” which involves the whole self: Exposure itself eradicates the words, thereby causing shame to be almost incommunicable to others … The excruciating observation of the self which results, this torment of self-­consciousness, becomes so acute as to create a binding, almost paralyzing effect upon the self. (p. 9) Psychoanalyst and shame pioneer Helen Block Lewis (1971) writes, “Shame disrupts ongoing activity as the self focuses completely on itself, and the result is confusion: inability to think clearly, inability to talk, and inability to act” (p. 34). In this sense, shame is a gestalt unto itself. Jungian Sandra Edelman (1998) writes in her meditation on shame that the inner subjective experience of shame is similar in that: we feel the ground is opening up and that we will disappear into the abyss (or wish to); there is a desire for flight away from the source of shame, accompanied by a feeling of paralysis, as though we were unable to move at all; our mental acuity diminishes, leaving us with a feeling that where there used to be a working mind there is now a slow-­moving ooze-­paralysis of the intellect; we sometimes have the sensation of intense heat from what I have called the “existential blush,” which registers in some strange place which is not just psyche and not just soma but both at once, as though a hellish flame had located the precise juncture of bodyself and soulself, the infinitesimal stem from which our life sprung. (p. 19) Shame is radically self-­focused and at the same time it exists because of our social brains. In the body-­brain system shame occurs as collapse. This protective withdrawal is self-­reinforcing as it psychically isolates us from the other body-­brains and dampens our connection to external frames of reference that could help re-­orient us in time, space, and place and come back into social engagement. Shame is effectuated so rapidly that it bypasses conscious decision-­making. Whether we are consciously aware of our shame, our bodies ability to interocept; to sense of the physiological condition of the body, is still active. Our capacity for interoception has the potential to increase awareness that shame is what is being experienced. This awareness, in turn, gives us the opportunity to activate areas of the brain that bring us out of withdrawal and into engagement.

Defining shame and its impacts   23

Secondary shame Shame has an impact that is so powerful and excruciating to self and others that it produces secondary shame: shame for having shame. The remora-­like quality of secondary shame must be accounted for in any treatment approach. That is to say, shame does not typically occur without secondary shame since, Kaufman quotes Tomkins, “this is because of the close association between shame and inferiority.… It is a self-­validating affect (or so believed) insofar as one believes one should try to conceal feelings of shame” (Kaufman, 1992, p. xxviii). For intersubjective psychologist Robert Stolorow (2013, para. 5), shame has a “double-­layered emotional structure,” whereby, the anxiety about having one’s shame exposed is so unbearable that the anxiety must often be somatized such that it only shows up as physical symptoms. This is particularly amplified in a culture that values achievement and success. Clinical psychologist and shame researcher June Tangney (1991) points out that the dominant culture is “shame phobic.” Jungian James Shultz (2013) writes that shame evokes such pain that, “It makes us want to turn away, to stop listening, to leave, to change the subject. We are even ashamed of those who are ashamed and we don’t want them around us” (para. 10). Psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Frank Broucek (1991, p.  62) wrote extensively on shame and states that secondary shame’s functional effect is maintaining the split off inferior aspects of the personality. Jungian Robert Johnson (1993) writes about the legitimate need to hide our dark side from society but warns that we should never hide it from ourselves. To expound on this, he goes on to discuss the concept of a doppelganger—also referred to as one’s mirror image, opposite, or the other within; whereby, to meet one’s inner other, is to confront the unsettling notion that one may not be the “sole master of their house,” alluding to facets that are secreted from conscious awareness (p. 16). Though he did not use the modern term “secondary shame,” Jung (1937/1969c) wrote that since shame is based on a private fear of the unconscious, “Of course one is reluctant to admit such a ridiculous fear” (p.  14). This can render us unaware of our shame or unable to communicate it, which impedes healing.

Continuums of moral and self-­c onscious emotions Intersubjective psychologist Robert Stolorow (2013) describes the emotional phenomenology of shame on a spectrum to include moral shame: having one’s moral flaws exposed; embarrassment: a mild form of shame; self-­consciousness: anticipatory shame; shyness: shying away from exposure to avoid shame; and humiliation: the experience of being made to feel inferior due to shameful exposure. That shame is based on social evaluation is a commonly held assumption consistent with its etymology. A flaw

24   Defining shame and its impacts

must be revealed in front of another to evoke shame, even shame that is evoked by a critical “imagined other” is still thought to initiate from social sources (Lewis, 1971). This theoretical tradition is supported by more recent empirical studies that link negative social evaluation and rejection to shame (Dickerson, Gruenewald, & Kemeny, 2004). Similarly, Shultz (2013, para. 8) presupposes that shame exists on a continuum that includes embarrassment, of which the hallmark is blushing; hence it has been called “skin shame.” On Shultz’s shame spectrum, embarrassment is on the mild side and “deep shame” is on the intense side. Deep shame occurs when “we are alone or in an introverted mode, or with another person whose acceptance makes us safe; deep shame is expressed as “anguish and sobbing” (Shultz 2013, para. 8). He regards shame as both an outer and an inner experience. The outer experience relates to exposure with the threat of being “cast out, alone, and cut off, and the cause of our dismemberment is our own deficiency or deformity or constitutional inadequacy, perhaps our exhibitionism”; as an inner experience, its “that we are not the person we thought we were … the knowledge of our unworthiness” becomes suddenly apparent (Shultz, 2013, para. 10). About the acute inner shame experience, he writes, “there’s no one to hide from, nothing to hide from, nowhere to go, and certainly no going back. That person is mortified, dead. Whatever comes next, if anything does, will have to be new” (Shultz, 2013, para. 10). On mortification, psychiatrist Andrew Morrison (1998) writes that it may be internally or externally (publicly) induced; either way, it propels the person into hiding and concealment. At all costs, the source of the mortifying emotion must not be revealed” (p.  53). Edward Edinger (1991) noted that mortification refers to the experience of death: “mortificatio is the most negative operation in alchemy. It has to do with darkness, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, and rotting. However, these dark images often lead over to positive ones: growth, resurrection, and rebirth” (p.  148). No other self-­conscious or moral emotion relates more intimately to mortification than shame. June Tangney (1991) also places shame on a spectrum and considers it a moral emotion as well as one of the self-­conscious emotions, which also include embarrassment, guilt, pride, and envy. Tangney acknowledges that confusion exists between shame and guilt, even amongst psychologists. She underscores that shame relates to the self-­focused belief that one is a bad person while guilt is a response to one’s own behavior. Therefore, the shamed person is defunct whereas the guilty person has the ability to make reparations. Her studies showed that whether you are more guilt versus shame prone is not based on the proclivities of one’s parents or grandparents, as is commonly purported, especially in family systems models (Tangney, 1991). Her study data mainly consists of self-­reports from interview subjects who were asked a series of questions to determine whether they tended toward guilt or shame. She stated that based on this data,

Defining shame and its impacts   25

there is no significant positive correlation between ancestral shame and personal shame, reinforcing the notion that shame is not innate. Further reinforcing this assertion, she points out that people may respond to the same stimulus with either guilt or shame. Shame and guilt are typically mentioned in the same breath, as moral emotions that inhibit antisocial, morally objectionable behavior. The very definition of shame includes the term guilt. Shame and guilt are often paired together in habits of speech and even used interchangeably. In this research, shame is defined as an experience unique unto itself. Psychologist Gershen Kaufman subscribes to Tomkins’ notion that shame is a primary affect, whereas guilt is an outcome or by-­product of shame. Kaufman (1992) characterizes guilt as a “disappointment in self ” with the underlying affect of shame, which are both responses to “a class of activators understood as moral”; more specifically, Kaufman writes that “guilt refers to shame which is about clearly moral matters—owing to a sudden break with one’s poignant disappointment own most cherished values in living” (p. 127). Extensive theoretical and empirical literature underscores striking differences in the phenomenology of guilt and shame; differences that have important and distinct implications for subsequent motivation and behavior (Lewis, 1971; Tangney, 1991). Several years of research indicate that shame and guilt are not equally “moral” or adaptive emotions. Evidence suggests that whereas guilt consistently motivates people in a positive direction, shame is a moral emotion that can easily go awry and lead to negative outcomes such a criminal recidivism (Tangney, 1991). With little to no hope for redemption, the motivation to change is compromised.

Characterizations of shame In common parlance, shame is interchangeably referred to as a feeling, affect, or emotion. Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory posits that affects are physiological phenomena that precede the onset of emotions; thereby distinguishing affects from emotions (Tomkins, 1963/2008). Although psychologists concerned with affect have defined feelings, emotions, and affects as distinct, the term “affect” is seldom used outside of the medical complex to distinguish the phenomena of shame with such discretion. There is disagreement across shame studies as to the origins, onset, or biological bases of shame. Some claim it is innate and others assert that it is learned. Though the terminology is inconsistent between theorists, two main prongs of shame have emerged: shame that is believed to be healthy or adaptive and shame that is believed to be unhealthy or maladaptive. If shame is viewed primarily as an innate survival mechanism or as a socially derived emotion designed for self-­preservation within a group, it follows that a healthy, adaptive form of shame could exist. If shame is viewed as a culturally imposed experience directed at social control under the guise of

26   Defining shame and its impacts

morality, then it is certainly plausible that shame is primarily maladaptive. Nevertheless, ideological commitments influence one’s belief as to shame’s function or dysfunction. There is debate as to whether shame can have beneficial outcomes; however, little evidence can be found as to the interor intrapersonal benefits of shame (Leary & Tangney, 2010), which begs the question: what is its basis for existence? The following discussion is organized according to a binary split between nature and nurture, one the oldest as yet unresolved debates. Of note, while some theorists staunchly place themselves in one or the other stance, many yield to the point of view of the other at some juncture.

Biography/nurture English philosopher and physician John Locke (1632–1704) wrote a highly influential work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wherein he refuted innate ideas proclaiming that morality originated from experience (Locke, 1689). Though his opinions were formed and disseminated more than 200 years ago, his morality can be readily observed in current society. Under this model, shame can only develop interpersonally; the moral aspect of shame functions to inhibit destruction and encourage altruism. He essentially touted a “blank slate” theory wherein children are empty of innate morality, recommending that shaming children was preferable to corporeal punishment as a means of control. In Locke’s words, “If we attentively consider new-­born children, we find little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them” (para. 2). Granted, his efforts gave parents an alternative to beating their children; however, he left a legacy of socially-­sanctioned shaming of children. Locke’s view of human nature is encapsulated as follows: only people who avow their atheism openly and without shame are wretches who are entirely given over to vice; but if the fear of legal or social consequences didn’t tie up people’s tongues, so that prospects of punishment or shame were taken away, many more people would proclaim their atheism as openly as their lives do. (para. 8) Therefore, shame maintains social order in accordance with Judeo-­ Christianity. Modern psychological shame researchers Leary and Tangney (2010) also conclude that there is no biological basis for shame: as such, it is derived purely from social interaction. Shame punishes immoral behavior, as it is felt when individuals violate (or anticipate violating) important social standards. Together, the self-­conscious emotions function to provide immediate and salient feedback on our social and moral acceptability— our  worth as a human being. For example, pride motivates pro-­social

Defining shame and its impacts   27

behaviors and is the emotion (along with shame) that gives self-­esteem its affective kick (Brown & Marshall, 2001). Notwithstanding, Leary and Tangney (2010) found guilt to be of greater benefit to social order than shame; because “at both the state and trait level, guilt and empathy go hand-­in-hand; whereas feelings of shame often interfere with an empathic connection” (p.  449). It should be said that even John Locke acknowledged that the utility of shame as a control device has limitations (Locke, 1693). Family systems and addiction recovery models of treatment, which have both maintained shame as part of mainstream nomenclature, also attribute shame to environmental conditions. These models are discussed together as there is substantial overlap with respect to shame attribution. Family dynamics are the key focus of both; as such, they situate and define shame in a systemic context. Several influential works on shame were published between the 1980s and 1990s including Fossum and Mason’s 1986 book Facing Shame: Families in Recovery and John Bradshaw’s 1988 book (revised in 2005) Healing the Shame that Binds You. Fossum and Mason (1986) theorized that shame is transmitted trans-­generationally with its origins being the parental “violation and diminution of personhood” of the child. Bradshaw’s work derived from his own addiction recovery process and is known to have coined the now popular terms “healthy shame” and “toxic shame”; healthy shame being a result of acknowledging a higher power (i.e., God) and toxic shame being the belief that one is fundamentally defective. He identifies shame as the motivator behind our “toxic” behaviors, which he believes encompass compulsions, co-­ dependency, addictions, and the drive to “superachieve,” ultimately resulting in destruction to the person and their family. Bradshaw relies heavily on psychological developmental models and attributes all toxic shame to faulty caregiving. In short, unlike Locke, Bradshaw’s basic view is that humans are innately good. This means that children are innocent until they are damaged within the family system, which he terms “soul murder.” Of particular interest for this book, Bradshaw surmised that we are all born creative artists but we are shamed into stifling our self-­expression (1988/2005). He believes shame requires an interpersonal relationship, that “shame-­based people” have a multigenerational lineage of shame, and that “shame-­bound” people have internalized an inner critic. For the shame-­bound person, all feelings and needs are met with shame, even joy: the belief is that the more you need, the more shameful you are (Bradshaw, 1988/2005). Underland-­Rosow (1995), a contemporary of Bradshaw’s and fellow 12-Step Program advocate, offers another take on the development of shame. She attributes shame to a process that began over 4,000 years ago termed “disenchantment,” which culminated with Newtonian physics. The primary outcomes of disenchantment are disconnection: “a separation into

28   Defining shame and its impacts

observer and object” and a lack of participation in one’s own life and surroundings” (p.  52). Underland-­Rosow asserts that this separation combined with the loss of Hermetic wisdom, which relies on the union of subject and object, lead to the belief that humans need an outside force to control behavior. She refers to the human–matter split in the story of Genesis in the Old Testament but also to Judeo-­Christianity’s demand for submission to the god figure through the religious hierarchical patriarchy. Underland-­Rosow (1995) asserts that shame is a key control device used by such religions and takes issue with Bradshaw’s healthy shame supposition, writing that he “confuses spirituality and religion,” and that, “shame is antithetical to spirituality” (p.  52). She takes exception to Bradshaw’s idea that healthy shame correlates to spiritual humility, asserting that his corollary is incorrect as these are distinct phenomena. Believing that all shame is toxic, Underland-­Rosow explicates the primary difference between shame and humility: “humility is defined as the recognition that one has both strengths and weaknesses” (p.  53) and that humbling one’s self required giving proper credit to a “Higher Power”; whereas, shame precludes such “realistic and fearless self-­assessments,” hindering the ability to be humble (p. 53).

Biology/nature Moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and the Scottish school of moral philosophy considered shame innate. Hutcheson related shame to benevolence, categorizing it as being “other-­directed” affection along with: natural affection, gratitude, honor, and compassion (Schmitter, 2014). Hutcheson (1747/2007) argues that we cannot turn our approbation or condemnation on the sense-­faculty itself, that is, we cannot judge its moral worth, except insofar as we use the moral sense. Hutcheson (1747/2007) explains human nature by first describing the peculiarities of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals. Our innate ability to sense beauty, for example, is the medium by which we receive the pleasure of visual proportion, harmony, and novelty in the objects. Hutcheson considered the moral sense to be the most important as it is through this that we monitor our own intents and actions. Hutcheson believed the innate moral sense predominated every other sense and assumed supreme authority in regulating our conduct. The historical basis for Hutcheson’s sense conceptions trace back to Stoic doctrine, “the calm and rational desires and aversions inspired by these senses, and the turbulent motions of the passions” (Hutcheson, 1747/2007). During the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece, the Stoic philosophers taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a person of moral and intellectual perfection would not be subject to “fear or envy or impassioned sexual attachments, or passionate love of anything whatsoever” (Baltzly,

Defining shame and its impacts   29

1996/2013, para. 1). The Stoics’ four passions include: fear, lust, distress, and delight. Shame falls under fear and is defined as a fear of disgrace. Baltzly writes of Stoicism that: though a person may have no choice about whether she has a particular rational impression, there is another power of the commanding faculty which the Stoics call ‘assent’ and whether one assents to a rational impression is a matter of volition. (para. 1) Accordingly, one might have a natural response that could, or should, be overridden by conscious choice. The notion of assent implies a vertical axis, a hierarchy of valued and de-­devalued human experiences. Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) devoted an entire book to describing shame and its psychosocial functions. His theory of innate, biologically-­ based affects describes the internal reward system that powers human motivation and explains the systematic, incremental development of emotion, learning, personality, and ideology. Tomkins’ affect theory comprises a substantial portion of modern psychology’s understanding of what are termed the primary affects, including shame. At its core, affect theory purports that the mechanism for the experience of shame is carried in the genes and built into the biological organism: therefore, shame is universal and innate. In that case, shame should have some biological utility. In his essay entitled: Shame, Tomkins (1987b) asserts that shame is a result of the inhibition of joy or excitement writing that “the experience of shame is inevitable for any human being insofar as desires outrun fulfillment sufficiently to attenuate interest without destroying it” (p.  388). Carrying on the scholarship of Tomkins is psychiatrist Donald Nathanson who asserts that shame’s biological function is to control affective output to protect against an organism’s propensity to attach itself to something that may be unsafe, as well as the overdevelopment of positive affects (Nathanson, 1992). This type of shame is referred to as signal shame. Shultz (2013) writes that shame is a powerful mechanism for social control and protects the group not only from dangerous deviants but also protects individuals from the tendency to deviate from the group. These ideas locate shame in the inner workings of the person, not attributable to purely environmental conditions. It reasons that human survival could be a biological basis for shame; yet, shame is affiliated with intrapersonal experiences that might not be easily explained by instinctive species progeneration.

Psychosocial developmental model Much of the shame literature, particularly the developmental theories, refers to Erik Erickson’s seminal work Childhood and Society (originally

30   Defining shame and its impacts

published in 1950), so it bears providing a brief summary of his model here. Erickson developed eight psychosocial stages of development and believed that nature determines the linear sequence of the stages and creates the boundaries within nurture operates. Erikson places shame in the second stage of development (ages one to three), which he labeled “autonomy versus shame and doubt,” wherein he accepts Freud’s suppos­ ition that a sense of mastery derives from controlling one’s bodily functions (1950/1963, p.  165). Failure to establish a sense of confidence and autonomy during this stage, largely through lack of supportive environmental conditions, engenders shame and self-­doubt. Note that Erikson did not focus on or expand upon the phenomenon of shame so it is unclear as to how he would have defined and conceptualized it. Additionally, though Erikson is loosely referenced in the work of other psychologists, these references can also be indefinite. For example, to establish his ideas on shame, John Bradshaw (1988/2005, p. 4) refers to Erikson’s first stage of human development, “basic trust versus basic mistrust,” the period when infants decide whether the world is safe based on parental responsiveness. Bradshaw places shame in this stage because he relates shame to having needs that are unmet or met with hostility. As Bradshaw relates shame to having needs, it follows that he would draw this parallel. This may be due to the various conceptions of shame over time and across cultures.

Shame as a psychobiological phenomenon Owing to scientific and technological advance beginning in the 1990s, neuro­scientists can observe the brain’s architecture, neural activity, synaptic interconnectivity, and isolate locations that activate according to given stimuli giving rise to several specializations within neuroscience including psychobiology. Psychobiology, also referred to as behavioral neuroscience, biological psychology, and biopsychology, is the application of neurobiological tenets to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior (Breedlove, Watson, & Rosenzweig, 2010). These efforts serve, in part, to plot a basis for comparison and to link observed behavior with brain activity. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) reports that neuroscience continues to identify correlations between brain activity and psychological phenomena: shame can be observed in brain scans (p.  102). In 2013, researchers Lauri Nummenmaa, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari K. Hietanen conducted a study that mapped bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a topographical self-­ report method. Participants from West Europe and East Asia were given body maps and asked to color in the areas of the body that were more activated to less activated while viewing silhouettes of bodies beside emotionally charged words and content or facial expressions. Each emotion tested was consistently associated with a certain pattern on the bodily

Defining shame and its impacts   31

activation on the maps across populations in the experiments. Shame was part of the negative emotion cluster they tested and categorized as one of seven non-­basic emotions, which also include: anxiety, love, depression, contempt, pride, and envy. Participants’ reaction to the shame stimuli yielded a very recognizable and discrete pattern: decreased activity in the limbs; increased activity in the abdomen from the throat area to the lower intestinal area; greater activation was reported in the head and neck, the highest points occurred on the face in the cheek areas. The study demonstrates that shame is experienced as a cross-­cultural physical phenomenon that is consistent across subjective reports. Because an exhaustive review of shame’s psychobiology is not within the scope of this study, this section aims only to establish that shame has its own physical reality notwithstanding the nature versus nature debate. Psychiatrist Allan Schore writes extensively on affect dysregulation and describes the psychophysiological event of shame as “a sudden shift from energy-­mobilizing sympathetic- to energy-­conserving parasympathetic-­ dominant autonomic nervous system activity, a rapid transition from a hyperaroused stated to a hypoaroused state …” (2015, p. 18). Briefly, the autonomic nervous system is the part of the peripheral nervous system that controls visceral functions such as heart rate, respiratory rate and digestion; the sympathetic nervous system is the part of the autonomic nervous system that is responsible for activating the part of the adrenal gland, which releases hormones into the bloodstream that cause the body’s activity to intensify and be more alert; the parasympathetic nervous system regulates the body’s homeostasis and allows for relaxation, also referred to as a rest and digest state. Sympathetic hyperarousal is commonly referred to as the fight or flight response; whereas, parasympathetic hypoarousal is thought of as the freeze response. Schore (2015) also provides a detailed portrait of shame’s psychobiological pattern as a painful distress state that manifests as “a sudden decrement in mounting pleasure, a rapid inhibition of excitement, and a cardiac deceleration by means of vagal impulses in the medulla oblongata” (p. 18). The medulla oblongata is the lower half of the brainstem, which controls the autonomic (involuntary) functions of breathing, heart rate and blood pressure. The vagus nerve has become part of the mental health zeitgeist. Behavioral neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges developed the polyvagal theory in the mid-­1990s based on experiments with the vagus nerve, which is specific to mammals and neuroanatomically linked to the cranial nerves that regulate social engagement through facial expression and vocalizations (2007). Porges’ polyvagal system has grown in popularity and continues to gain ground in the helping professions. The vagus nerve also connects the brain to major systems in the body including the stomach and gut, heart, lungs, and throat. Porges’ research reveals that our nervous system reflects an evolutionary progression into branches. The primary evolutionary

32   Defining shame and its impacts

system is the dorsal vagal complex. This branch of the vagus nerve operates the vagal brake, which consists of defensive actions including immobilization, fainting, or playing dead. The dorsal vagal brake is associated with the physiology of shame. The most recently evolved portion of the nervous system is the ventral vagal complex, which Porges associates with what he terms the social engagement system (2007). According to his theory, the social engagement system must be reactivated to restore functioning and move a person from a frozen state (i.e, dorsal vagal brake). Important to understanding how shame operates, Porges’ (2009) concept of neuroception: the totally involuntarily operation of primitive neural circuits. Neuroception can detect and evaluate risk in the environment without our conscious awareness. When a threatening situation is neurocepted, involuntary autonomic responses such as increased in heart rate can occur. According to Porges’ (2009) polyvagal theory, our nervous system has more than one defense strategy and which strategy is implemented is not a voluntary decision (i.e., mobilized flight/flight or immobilization shutdown). If a threat occurs and a person is physically constrained from fight or flight, the system will likely immobilize as a defense. That is to say, just as the vagal brake is an involuntary response to threat, shame is not an affect we chose to feel.

Shame research Many of the studies conducted on shame pertain primarily to the social aspect of shame; that is, shame as defined by social self-­preservation theory. Social self-­preservation theory proposes that shame is induced by social evaluative threats, which spur a coordinated psychobiological response (Dickerson, Gruenewald, & Kemeny, 2004). Rohleder et al. (2008) point out that, to date, certain aspects of psychobiological studies are inconclusive and concede that further research is needed. Notwithstanding, these studies make important contributions to the body of knowledge on shame as much of what has been formulated about shame predates such data or does not include measurable, quantitative data to support the postulates set forth. A study conducted at the University of California (Dickerson et al., 2004) focused on shame as a key response to social evaluation and rejection and found that shame orchestrated specific patterns of psychobiological changes under these conditions. More specifically, the researchers found that threats to the social self resulted in increased shame and on the physiological level: as demonstrated by measurable increases in activity in the cortisol system, which is associated with stress responses. Throughout their laboratory and longitudinal studies, they discovered positive correlations between shame and health outcomes that were not correlated with more general affective states (e.g., distress), confirming that shame has a unique impact on the body. They postulated

Defining shame and its impacts   33

that shame’s pattern of psychobiological changes may be adaptive in socially threatening, uncontrollable situations if the threats to the social self are short-­term or infrequent; otherwise, under sustained threat this response pattern may yield negative psychological and physical health outcomes. Ultimately, the Dickerson et al. 2004 study concluded that the physiological correlates of shame have been greatly understudied in psychobiological research and longitudinal studies are needed to determine impacts of chronic shame. In 2008, Rohleder et al. conducted a study at the University of British Columbia in Canada that focused on the psychobiology of trait shame in young women. The study’s aim was to extend the conclusions reached by the University of California’s 2004 study discussed above. One of the motivations for this study was that though the Dickerson et al. 2004 result confirmed that social evaluative threat evokes shame, which then shapes a coordinated psychobiological response in acute stress studies; there is an absence of research on chronic experiences of shame. The findings of Rohleder et al. (2008) corroborated that shame has a unique physiological response pattern as compared to other similar negative emotions. Their study also surmised that in addition to adverse psychological impacts, chronic shame could have detrimental effects on biological systems, because shame is generally associated with low self-­esteem resulting in withdrawal and passive coping methods (Tangney, Miller, Flicker, & Barlow, 1996). The specifics of this relationship were not elaborated in the research. The Rohleder et al. study asserts that most instances of shame are precipitated by social threats—that is, events that make a person feel devalued in relation to another. However, the research conceded that one of the difficulties in measuring shame is that other types of experiences (i.e., non-­social threats) can also bring about shame. The study did not specify what the “other experiences” consisted of and concluded that more research was needed as there were too many outstanding variables, regarding shame, to be fully conclusive. While not a comprehensive study of physiological impacts of shame in all its various manifestations, the data retrieved in these studies serve to make a convincing connection between the experience of shame and a psychobiological corollary. In terms of the utility of this psychobiological research for depth psychology, it demonstrates that shame is not only an inhibiting psychobiological response but, if left to fester, shame can lead to mental disorders.

Impacts of shame on self-­e xpression A grasp of what shame is and how it manifests personally and socially is essential to demystifying it as an impediment to artistic self-­expression. Much like its origins, shame’s impacts are multifarious and difficult to quantify. Most people have felt shame or have been shamed at some point, and these experiences can range from a short-­term shame state that occurs

34   Defining shame and its impacts

as a response to a single event or living within a shame-­based family, religious, or other social system. Depending on an individual’s proclivities and circumstances, any shame scenario has the potential to impact a person to such an extent that the making of art is impossible or very difficult. Several psychologists have postulated that shame produces profound impacts on the developing self beginning in infancy and causing impacts to self-­ perception that continue into adulthood. Kaufman (1992) writes on shame, “The outcomes of development are varied indeed. A more-­or-less unified self may be present which must contend with either an enhancing or a harsh and punitive internal identification image, or a significant part of the self has been disowned” (p. 127). Edelman (1998) writes that shame results in pervasive self-­condemnation that stifles “self-­assured inquisitiveness, daring originality, and creativity” (p.  26). For the purposes of examining the relationship between shame and the making of art, the following discussion focuses on those impacts deemed to pose fundamental blocks to artistic self-­expression. The impacts explicated are distortions in self-­ perception such as self-­objectification, splitting, and perfectionism; all of which can eventuate as impediments to art making.

Self-­o bjectification The basis of self-­objectification is generally thought to be within the mother–infant dyad. Allan Schore (2015) has written extensively on the subjects of attunement and mirroring, concluding that if the caregiver does not mirror a child’s joy, shame results. Schore (2015) writes, “The ensuing break in an anticipated visual-­affective communication triggers a shock-­ induced deflation of positive affect … and shame represents this rapid state transition from a pre-­existing positive state to a negative state” (p. 17); this negative state engenders a child’s desire to hide, to avoid attention in order to become “unseen” (p. 18). Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1967) also believed in the crucial role of the caregiver’s responsiveness to the infant in the development of the self. Winnicott (1967) presupposed that, as with shame, the capacity for play and creativity develops within the context of the mother–infant relationship. He related shame to seeing and being seen writing, “being seen is at the basis of creative looking” (p. 114) and that when babies look into their mother’s face and do not see themselves reflected back, “their own creative capacity begins to atrophy” (p.  112). Consistent with this idea, Broucek (1991) writes: “the still-­face gaze is the prototype of what will become the objectifying gaze, the gaze that denies or ignores one as a subject or self and recognizes only one’s surface behavior or material aspects” (p. 36). Erich Neumann (1979), a student of Jung, attributes feeling accursed to failures in mothering and the archetypal ­Terrible Mother. He writes, “The unlovingness of the stony mother turns her into a Gorgon who ‘petrifies’ her victim” (p.  175). Edelman (1998)

Defining shame and its impacts   35

also finds symbolism in the mask of the gorgon, which is designed not only to make a permanently ugly face but also to terrorize and petrify the viewer. In his writings on self-­consciousness, French philosopher Jean-­Paul Sartre wrote that shame is not about being unworthy but of being an object (Guney, 2015). Stolorow (2013) refers to Sartre’s notion of shame as being based on feeling objectified and being exposed as defective before the gaze of another—even if the other is our self (para. 1). He partly attributes shame to being tyrannized and held hostage in another’s gaze, “we belong, not to ourselves, but to them;” shame, he writes, is “indicative of an inauthentic or unowned way of existing” (Stolorow, 2013, para. 1). Broucek (1991) refers to Warren Kingston’s 1983 theory of shame, which is predicated on one’s “temptation to abandon one’s authentic subjectivity and become an object, which would lead to one’s behavior becoming reactive and mechanical with a loss of spontaneity and autonomy” (p. 49). Bradshaw’s work ascribes to the false self-­concept that was developed by Winnicott explaining that shame creates in a division of self that results in the development of a false self and an inner critic. In what Bradshaw identifies as a self-­rupture, the belief becomes: I am an object to myself, I am not in myself. Like Freud and other developmental theorists, Broucek (1991) assumes a child’s sense of self is primarily based on bodily experience that is: immediate, preconceptual, and non-­imagistic; it is the basis of our most profound identification with our body, and it is what provides us with the experience of “indwelling,” the experience of the “lived body” rather than the body as part of the object world. (p. 37) Self-­objectification occurs as result of being incompatible with the actuality of being, the immediate sense of self as indwelling. (p. 40) Sylvia Perera (1986, p. 40) writes that the body is a place of secret shame for a person who has focused rage at self on a specific perceived physical deficit. This scapegoating of the body fuels and justifies ongoing self-­ hatred. Objectification theory presupposes that women are acculturated to see their bodies through the perspective of an observer, which can lead to compulsive body monitoring, which may initiate shame and anxiety and dampen interoception. The body as object is the position that views the self through the eyes of others. A study performed in 2013 by Ainley and Tsakiris concluded that that poor interoception was associated with self-­ objectification. In terms recognizing the impacts of self-­objectification and

36   Defining shame and its impacts

gender ideologies, the cumulative effects are demonstrated through increased incidences of depression, sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders in women (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Objectification also occurs when part of a woman’s body is separated from her total person and compartmentalized as an instrument that may supplant her subjectivity identity (Bartky, 1990). In accordance with objectification theory, Broucek (1991) writes that because women have become accustomed to being viewed by men in an objectifying manner that she, in response, turns herself into an object (p. 121). He addresses a case of shame for a female patient wherein analysis revealed that she was most likely to experience shame in the face of a compliment about her appearance in the presence of others. Her fear was that accepting the compliment would arouse the envy of female co-­workers, leading to her rejection from her same-­gender peers (p.  71). Broucek (1991, p.  122) references Psychiatrist Robert Jesse Stoller’s 1979 interview with “Olympia,” an exotic dancer, for the purpose of presenting her as a prototypical hysteric to medical students. Stoller is known for his theories on gender identity and sexual excitement. In the interview Olympia proclaims that she experiences no shame about nudity or sexuality because she considers herself naturally lewd and because she sees her body and her self as a commodity. She states that she had no “self ” as she consisted of a conglomerate of others: her manager, her accountant, her choreographer, and others. She reported being turned on sexually while wearing a mask because it allowed her the freedom to have any facial expression she wanted. This is one mechanism to protect the subjective self from shame vulnerability, as the face is the central point for affect expression. Objectification of the human body is apparent on both a personal and a social level. Self-­attack is sanctioned in forms that manifest as extreme exercise, financial success at any cost, or the various veiled pursuits of perfection. Controlling and disciplining the body, rejecting the body’s needs and desires to achieve an external goal is often lauded as heroic. Based on his research on psychological interconnectedness of pain and pleasure, Psychologist Dr. Brock Bastian, defined functional self-­punishment, which serves to allay guilt or shame related to a perceived moral transgression (Heid, 2014). He writes that functional self-­punishment effectively “raises your stature in the eyes of others … suffering through a grueling endurance race or difficult workout can make you seem tolerant, persistent, and strong …” Dr. Bastian’s work including numerous studies on self-­ dehumanization is associated with aversive self-­awareness, cognitive deconstructive states and feelings of shame, guilt, sadness and anger. Accordingly, it may be conjectured that the tendency to split and/or become perfectionistic are reactions to the shame of objectification, of losing one’s subjectivity, or defense against the intolerable shame of feeling one’s self to be an object.

Defining shame and its impacts   37

Splitting There is widespread agreement that shame can lead to splitting off aspects of the personality, meaning that, the self has become split into two or more partial selves, which may occur to the person as partially conscious or unconscious. Jungian Lawrence Staples (2009) writes, “Early in life we suppress or repress parts of ourselves that are unacceptable to our parents and other authorities, which results in what is often referred to as the ‘early wound’ ” (p. 2). Similarly, Broucek (1991) believes a lack of support during developmentally important stages in childhood is responsible for various disorders of the self as the child may learn to suppress or repress “his original action tendencies” (p. 28) which could result in pathological shame. When one part of the self disowns another part, self-­contempt and an internal battle of blame can occur; maintaining the inner split and “unrelenting punishment becomes inflicted by the self upon the self ” (Kaufman, 1992, p. 127). Furthermore, “when disowned parts of the self make themselves felt or what may be even worse, their presence is somehow sensed or seen by another, the self may inflict unrelenting suffering upon the self ” (p. 115). For Kaufman, this process is deleterious to the person as, “Nothing is so precious to the self as its own integrity” (p. 108). In Jung’s essay On Psychic Energy he writes: Multiplicity and inner division are opposed by an integrative unity whose power is as great as that of the instincts. Together they form a pair of opposites necessary for self-­regulation, often spoken of as nature and spirit.… Thus every child born within him a split in his make-­up on one side is more less like animal, on the other side he is the final embodiment of an age old and endlessly complicated sum of hereditary factors. (1928/1969b, p. 51) In Man and his Symbols, Jung et al. (1964) distinguishes between pathological dissociation (i.e., psychic splitting) and the divided personality, which he considers to be one of the curses of modern man. Jung wrote that humans are still evolving and are unaware of large parts of their minds; furthermore, the psyche is part of nature and will always be enigmatic. Jung doubted whether one could achieve total unity of consciousness but he emphasized that conscious splitting is a “civilized achievement,” whereas, splitting without control or even knowledge of the event is a “loss of soul” or the “pathological cause of a neurosis” (p. 8). Jung’s conceptualizations of splitting, which includes his theory of “complexes” should also be mentioned although not examined in detail here. For Jung, complexes “do indeed behave like secondary or partial personalities possessing a mental life of their own” (1955/1970, p. 238). He writes that these split

38   Defining shame and its impacts

off complexes can occur as a result of repression but that some complexes never reach consciousness; “They grow out of the unconscious and invade the conscious mind with their weird and unassailable convictions and impulses” (p.  14). Jung presupposes that the presence of such complexes explains, to some extent, why a person is afraid of becoming conscious of her/himself. He writes that those unknown contents engender shame. Fear of self-­revelation can block creativity because our art reflects ourselves, fear of rejection is terrifying (Staples, 2009, p.  71). It is not surprisingly then that Jung’s posthumously published The Red Book “displays many complexes that bedevil him” (Ulanov, 2013, p. 43).

Perfectionism If a primary cause of shame is related to being seen, discovered as defective, it follows then that a person would do their best to hide all imperfections. Kaufman (1992) writes that perfectionism is “a striving against shame and attempts to compensate for an underlying sense of defectiveness” (p.  87). If I can become perfect, no longer am I so vulnerable to shame. The fantasy that perfection can somehow be attained combined with the inevitable failure to achieve it, re-­activates shame. Regarding possible developmental roots of perfectionism, Broucek (1991) presupposes that if a mother does not support her child’s sense of efficacy, “the primitive sense of self will be damaged,” along with the “capacity for initiative” (p. 5). The primitive self is concerned with surviving; any perceived rejection from a caretaker represents possible annihilation. Thus, the child must perfectly attune to and reflect shame projections, paralyzing spontaneous self-­expression. Once shame is deeply internalized and establishes itself as part of the personality, one no longer needs an observing other to criticize mistakes or render negative judgment—this process happens between parts of the self—resulting in self-­inhibition and the feeling of being immobilized (Kaufman, 1992). Jungian Donald Kalsched (1996) explains how a person’s mind becomes “a tyrannical perfectionist, persecuting its weaker feeling-­self, all the while hiding it as its shameful secret partner … the victim-­self ” (p. 95). Psychotherapist Marion Woodman (1985) speaks specifically to the female experience of shame in writing: Most contemporary women are the daughters of patriarchy; their mothers and grandmothers were daughters of patriarchy. They know very well how to organize, how to set a goal in some transcendent perfection. They know, too, the shadow of that perfection that never ceases to judge, to blame, to find them guilty for the crime of being themselves. (p. 352)

Defining shame and its impacts   39

Clinical psychologist Susan Miller (1985) writes that shame imbues one with a sense of helplessness that can progress to self-­hatred. Self-­hatred is active, as opposed to a depressive shamed state, and has the effect of reducing susceptibility to shame. However, the utility of self-­attack backfires when the person “must put aside mastery-­through-fantasy and must resume functioning in the world,” as it becomes apparent that the attacked, dissociated aspects need to be reintegrated in order to fully proceed (p.  137). If a person continues self-­aggression in the outer world (versus internal images) perfectionism prevails. Though Jungian Sylvia Brinton Perera does not use the word “shame,” she describes all of its attributes in her 1986 book “The scapegoat complex: Toward a mythology of shadow and guilt.” She writes that the scapegoated person has a distorted relationship, at most, to inner creativity because the hellish, defensive, internal situation results in an inability to tolerate the solitude necessary for creative work. If work is created it may be comprised of stolen materials and not shared since the scapegoat is convinced it will be rejected and spoiled. Furthermore, the perfectionistic aspect of the scapegoated person blocks the “improvisational play necessary for finding one’s own voice” (p. 29). Our art reflects ourselves and if one believes him/herself to be flawed then the art they create must also be imperfect (Kaufman, 1992, p. 9). This engenders a terrifying fear of rejection upon exposure; it is equivalent to fear of obliteration (Staples, 2009). Making art poses myriad possible threats to the shamed, perfectionistic self. Staples writes that creation occurs in the gap between perfection and imperfection, “perfection is the enemy of creation” (2009, p. 61). Artists and authors Bayles and Orland (2012) state that the goal of perfection is a trap for the artist who is expressing something novel and personal. In one sense, it is easier to achieve a pre-­existing standard because you know where you are going than to confront the unknown and give form to a new idea. There is a fallacy that lies at the heart of how the average person assesses whether his or her own artistic creations are good: good art equals perfection. This view represents the fantasy that one can see the work as an objective other, as though the true reality is objective. However, it is not plausible to remove subjectivity, as there must be an observing subject. It is the irreplaceability of an art piece, due in part to its imperfection, its unique signature that reflects the artist and the culture in a particular state, place, and time that gives it a meaningful context (Bayles & Orland, 2012). This is not apparent to most people, those who were raised to follow direction, paint by numbers, color inside the lines, and to believe that there was a right way to make art; a right way to express your self. Therefore, if it comes from me—if this work is simply from my imagination and does not adhere to the rules of art—it cannot be perfect; it cannot be good (Pinkola-­ Estes, 2005).

40   Defining shame and its impacts

Impacts of Judeo-­C hristianity on art making A more insidious source of shame in creating artwork may be connected to Judeo-­Christian beliefs about idolatry and incarnation. Whether self-­ inhibiting shame is empirically linked to this morality and the extent to which it prevents art making is speculative but to understand how modern art transgresses the dominant culture, it is necessary to establish that, in the West, Judeo-­Christianity collectively influences us. Gnuse (1997) writes that monotheism was made explicit in the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament verse 44:6 (King James Version): “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.” This model of monotheism became the basis for Judeo-­Christianity (Coogan, 2009). There are numerous references to this possessive and jealous mandate of the Judeo-­Christian god: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is one of the Ten Commandments. This largely addressed belief systems (e.g., polytheism, paganism, animism) that imbued animate and inanimate, natural and manmade, objects with spirit or divinity. From the Judeo-­Christian perspective, this represents the sin of making false idols. Despite the longstanding role of the object as symbol from time immemorial the essence of this act defies allegiance to Judeo-­Christianity’s one and only “God.” Note that, object-­ symbols, the crucifix for example, that are sanctioned by and assigned meaning according to the dogma of dominant religion and culture, however, do evade the audacious sin of idolatry since they glorify God and not man or nature. In the subsequent verses of Isaiah the scripture devolves into the near ridicule of the human tradition of making and worshipping idols. Nowhere is God’s disdain for the human desire to create idols more pointedly described than in Isaiah 44:9: “They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed.” Accordingly, creation and incarnation are reserved for God. Verses 10 to 20 further explicate the foolishness of artisans for their efforts to create “idols,” to make symbols with metaphysical meaning. God pronounces in various verses throughout the Bible that one cannot love the world and love God; you must hate one or the other. The apostle Paul pronounced the worship of human-­created things to be the cause of the disintegration of sexual and social morality. Peter and the Book of Revelation refer to the connection between the worship of other gods and sexual sins, whether metaphorically or literally (Coogan, 2009). In Martin Luther’s words: Idolatry consists not merely in erecting an image and worshiping it, but rather in the heart, which stands gaping at something else, and seeks help and consolation from creatures, saints, or devils, and neither cares for God, nor looks to Him for so much good as to believe that

Defining shame and its impacts   41

He is willing to help, neither believes that whatever good it experiences comes from God. (Luther, 1921) Referring to the Judeo-­Christian notion of idolatry, existential psychologist Rollo May (1975) writes, “By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death” (p. 32). If by creating we are transcending our own death, this poses a threat to the all-­powerful God. Assemblage art distorts the natural order by imbuing objects with subjectivity, or life, and through its resuscitation of dead objects. God in the book of Genesis created order out of chaos (May, 1975, p.  93). As the one and only creator and the single progenitor of order, it would follow that artists also offend God as they “love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form” (Jung et al., 1964, p. 298). May makes a crucial avowal regarding creative acts that moves beyond the god of monotheism when he writes, “creativity provokes the jealousy of the gods … an active battle with the gods is occurring” (1975, p.  27). Judeo-­Christianity attempted to eradicate all other gods rendering polytheism evil with Dionysus representing its biggest rival (Seaford, 2006, p. xi). Jungian Edward Whitmont (1969) writes that Pan and Dionysus were demoted to the nether regions of hell by the Medieval church … they represent “divinities”—namely autonomous creative drives, independent of man’s volition—which are related to the lunar or earthly world of generativeness, joy, lust, sexuality, growth, and renewal through life and death cycles of nature. (p. 44) Germane to our cultural condition, Judeo-­Christianity played a central and aggressive part in the suppression of individual symbol formation (Jung, 1917/1928). Notwithstanding, it has been a mainstay of human mental activity, even if subversively.

Chapter 3

The art of assemblage

In simple terms, assemblage art consists of transforming separate and distinct objects into a unified art piece. Assemblage art is defined as follows: Art form in which natural and manufactured, traditionally non-­artistic materials, and objets trouvés are assembled into three-­dimensional structure.… In an assemblage the banal, often tawdry materials retain their individual physical and functional identity, despite artistic manipulation … assemblage emphasizes the visual or tactile qualities of formerly utilitarian objects while nevertheless exploiting the perception of the banality of such objects. (“assemblage”) Renowned modern art historian William Seitz (1961) depicts assemblage as art made by fastening together a cut or torn pieces of paper, clippings from newspapers, photographs, bits of cloth, fragments of wood, metal, or other such materials, shells or stones, or even objects such as knives and forks, chairs and tables, parts of dolls and mannequins, automobile fenders, steel boilers, and stuffed birds and animals. He was referring to work created in the nineteenth century; yet these materials are still commonplace in contemporary assemblages. Art critic Robert Atkins (2013) writes that the “use of non-­art elements or even junk from the real world often gives assemblages a disturbing rawness and sometimes a poetic quality;” in that sense, assemblage art shares the “delight in everyday things and a subversive attitude toward ‘official’ culture” with the Beat Generation poetry of the late 1950s” (p.  80). Though its irreverent use of materials and disregard for traditional fine art technique is perceived as countercultural, assemblage itself is not a movement. Atkins writes, “assemblage is a technique, not a style” (p. 80). The resurgence of assemblage in the 1990s and its continued practice today

The art of assemblage   43

proves it to be a medium almost as flexible and important in modern art as painting or traditional sculpture (Coogan, 2009). Delineating its origins and defining what constitutes assemblage art across time and space is somewhat problematic as its roots may be traced back to antiquity. As such, this study refers to assemblage as a modern art with a Western European lineage, largely because Western European artists and art movements are often credited as being predecessors to American assemblage artists. Notwithstanding, Atkins (2013, p.  80) regards assemblage art as occurring internationally but particularly in the United States. This discussion focuses on the art process; therefore, analyses of particular assemblage works and a comprehensive list of assemblage artists are not provided. In the interest of understanding the cultural milieu and dynamics in which assemblage art was occurring, artists who have been written about most commonly by scholars and/or described their assemblage process and pieces, especially in psychological terms, are referenced as apropos. Two major artistic movements are generally attributed to the development of assemblage: Dadaism and Surrealism, both of which commented on the cultural, political, and societal status quo as well as provided unconventional alternatives to the ruling class of traditional esthetic arts. Though Dadaism and Surrealism are defined discretely, the literature reveals overlapping themes and each lay claim to some of the same artists. Additionally, there is no unanimous decision as to who introduced assemblage to the world’s stage. Note again that assemblages do not conform easily to predetermined categories and assemblage art is created by artists across creative disciplines. The intent of this section is to orient assemblage art in space and place not to provide an exhaustive account of this art form’s history. According to art historians, assemblage began as a method used by major artists early in the twentieth century. In 1912 Spanish painter Pablo Picasso was the first contemporary master to produce a collage and then went on to construct small cubist objects from fragments of cardboard and wood (Seitz, 1961). Dadaism arose in the mid-­1910s and spanned to the mid-­ 1920s in major cities in Western Europe such as Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, and Paris. In the United States New York City was a noted participant. Dada art was focused on content over form; artists regarded the esthetic as being subordinate to the concept. The Museum of Modern Art (2015) describes Dada artists as “Using unorthodox materials and chance-­ based procedures, they infused their work with spontaneity and irreverence” they experimented with everything from collage to performance (para. 1). Artists Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters are important figures in Dadaism and are also renowned for assemblages. Both Duchamp and Schwitters rejected what they considered “retinal” art; in other words, art intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to put art back in the service of the mind (Duchamp, 1968).

44   The art of assemblage

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), arguably one the best known of these artists, also referred to as anti-­artists, was known for his “readymade” pieces. Jungian analyst Aniela Jaffe wrote extensively about modern art and credited the French anti-­artist with starting the found objects element of this epoch’s art (Jung et al., 1964). However, his readymades characteristically required little, if any, actual assembly. One of his famed pieces is simply an unaltered, unadorned urinal for example. This affront to conventional art might be explained by his denunciation of the art establishment. In a 1968 BBC Interview, Duchamp expressed disdain toward art itself, comparing art with religion, whereby he stated that he wished to “do away” with art the same way many have done away with religion. Duchamp believed that the distinction between artists and non-­artists was a social construct as “the word art etymologically means to do,” that art  means activity of any kind, and that it is our society that creates “purely artificial” distinctions of being an artist. He also does concede the paradox of getting away from something he had always been part of (Duchamp, 1968). German artist, poet, and typographer, Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) developed Merz in 1919 with his Dada esthetic. His Merz constructions consisted of wood, wire mesh, paper, and cardboard that were purposely made to look esthetically unappealing. Schwitters’ unique style of assemblage represented, “the union of sundry quotidian items with formal artistic elements,” and exemplified his desire for “freedom from all fetters,” cultural, political, or social (Guggenheim, 2015, para. 1). Merz has been called “Psychological Collage.” In Schwitters’ own words: In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready.… Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been. (Schwitters, 1921) Jungian Aniela Jaffe (1964) writes of Kurt Schwitters, “His kind of imaginative art uses (and transforms) ordinary things” (Jung et al., 1964, p. 286). She lauded Schwitters manner of assemblage in that it was created “with such seriousness and freshness that surprising effects of strange beauty came about” (p. 286). His works contained autobiographical components from his everyday life. Dickerman (2013) writes that Schwitters’ work “offered a glimpse into an illusory world, as if seen through a window or mirror … an accumulation of disparate things on the surface … reflecting the artist’s daily movements through the world” (p. 14). One might surmise from these readings that these artists wanted their work to be intimately connected with the material world, not attributed solely to

The art of assemblage   45

the kinds of higher esthetic or religious aspiration of conventional art that preceded them. Surrealism began with a literary movement in Paris during the late 1910s based on automatism, or automatic writing, understood as a channel to the subconscious. Surrealists were influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories and were known to free associate believing that it allowed their work to emerge from the subconscious; thus they were intentionally and decidedly psychological. Some of the famous visual artists associated with this movement that created assemblages in Europe include Salvador Dali and Joan Miro. According to Seitz (1961), Salvador Dali and the surrealists “fabricated fantastic agglomerations of mannequins, lobsters, loaves of bread, etc., which dramatized their esthetic of irrational juxtaposition” (p. 39). It is not essential to demarcate the exact boundaries of time, space, technique, or even content that exist between Dada and Surrealism. Of note for this research is how both related to the human experience as being psychological and creative and attempted to communicate the inner situation, the irrational and irreverent, through assemblage. American assemblage influences are commonly attributed to the European milieu described above. Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) are two of the best-­known American assemblage artists. In terms of a historic timeline, Joseph Cornell is a predecessor to Rauschenberg by roughly two decades (Waldman, 2002, p. 13). Assemblage found its formal beginnings in the United States with Joseph Cornell in the 1930s; he was known for enclosing his assemblages in glass-­covered boxes in which he used objects such as pasted reproductions, wine glasses, marbles, maps, and flowing sand (Seitz, 1961). Surrealism’s unexpected imagery, symbolism, and unconventionality are thought to have influenced Joseph Cornell (Voorhies, 2014). Also directly affected by the Europeans, Rauschenberg said of Kurt Schwitters’ work that he “felt like he made it all just for me,” speaking to a certain readability to such particular content (Meyer-­Buser & Orchard, 2000). In 1961, assemblage art made a significant move into the American public sphere through the New York Museum of Modern Art’s The Art of Assemblage exhibition, which featured the works of Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kurt Schwitters. The following discussion is focused on American assemblage, as well American Outsider Art, including artists such as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Wallace Berman, and Edward Kienholz. The emphasis on American, especially California assemblage art, is due to the heuristic method used in this study. This research assumes that, due to temporal and physical proximity, the culture climate that influenced these artists likely affected the researcher as well, even if marginally and unconsciously. Joseph Cornell became acquainted with a wide range of Surrealist art as early as 1931 and by 1932 he was producing his shadow boxes, which

46   The art of assemblage

consisted of small circular or rectangular found boxes containing engravings and objects. Cornell also showed his Jouets Surrealists, comprised partly of altered toys by collage, his use of toys was intended to demonstrate the relationship between art and play (Marter, 2011, p. 555). Later, Cornell began to make his own wooden boxes for his assemblage pieces; which were featured in a 1936 installation at the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Visual associations that were made to Cornell’s work were compared to the Surrealists; however, Cornell did not share their interest in psychology and the subconscious and wanted to distance himself from mainstream Surrealism (Marter, 2011, p. 555). Robert Rauschenberg is regarded as a key figure in assemblage art due to his highly unorthodox blending of materials and methods. Rauschenberg’s work, composed of arrangements of boxes within boxes, emerged on the art scene in the 1950s. “A master of impure dualities,” writes art critic and historian Carolyn Lanchner (2009, p.  11) Rauschenberg wanted to operate in the gap between art and life. Lanchner quotes poet Marjorie Welish in describing Rauschenberg’s work in that, “it flaunts a duality as though it were a unity” (p. 12). Dealing in opposites continued to be a theme in Rauschenberg’s work. One of his pieces, for example, consists of oil and pencil on bed linens, creating the illusion that the viewer might be able to crawl unto it; as such, “in one ambiguous space, it conflates the private retreat of the bedroom and the public display of art … it unmakes distinctions, coaxing opposites into cooperative action” (Lanchner, p.  17). Dickerman (2013, p.  14) writes that Rauschenberg’s work “Combines,” which consist of found objects and photographs he took during a soul-­searching trip to Europe and North Africa, expressed “both the expansive heterogeneity of materials and a world view that brings together the public with the private. In these works he showed a “clear penchant for the well worn, broken down, and outmoded” (p. 8). California gave rise to noted assemblage artists Wallace Berman (1926–1976), Edward Kienholz (1927–1994), and George Herms (1935–). Wallace Berman has been dubbed the “father of assemblage art” and a “crucial figure in the history of postwar California art” (Smithsonian, 2001). From 1955 to 1964, Berman published a series of folio packages that consisted of his collages, mixed with poetry, and published under the pseudonym “Pantale Xantos” (Hammer Museum, 2014). Kienholz’s installations and assemblages were seen as a critique on modern life. As is common with assemblage artists, Kienholz did not formally study art and used his mechanical and carpentry skills to construct pieces from objects that were discarded on city streets. His found objects assemblages were composed of “the detritus of modern existence, often including figures cast from life,” and described as, “at times vulgar, brutal, and gruesome, confronting the viewer with questions about human existence and the inhumanity of twentieth-­century society” (National Gallery of Art, 2015, para.

The art of assemblage   47

2). On finding the objects during the assemblage process, Kienholz felt he could understand society by going to second hand stores and flea markets; he believed that objects represent ideas that have been rejected by culture (Shanes, 2009). George Herms is known for using discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken everyday objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning (Zhong, 2013). According to Walter Hopps, a prominent American museum director and curator, Herms’ work was on par with the assemblages of Picasso, Duchamp, Schwitters, Cornell, as well as California artists Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz (Allan, 2005, para. 12). Herms credits Berman with teaching him that any object could be interesting if appropriately contextualized. Assemblage artists find inspiration in streets, alleys, and second hand stores, the domain of the manmade, the idol, and the idle. Though natural materials may be used, they are removed from their native habitat, changing their meaning and form, essentially joining the ranks of the manufactured. Some artists are moved to create by other arts and humanities, unresolved conflicts (inner and/or outer), any source in actuality, but never without some contact, some experiential component—real or imagined—it is a corporeal art that eventually requires incarnation. In terms of the development of consciousness, Staples (2009) writes that it requires that opposites be in close contact, that they are “experienced side by side in close proximity,” which cannot occur if one of the pair of opposites is “unacceptable and repressed” (p. 3). Though not speaking to assemblage art specifically, Jung held the opinion that because civilization created a rift between spirit and matter, man and his instincts, the conscious and the unconscious, modern art sought to express “these opposites characterize the psychic situation” (Jung et al., 1964, p. 290). Also regarding the drive to expression, Jaffe writes: It is the aim of the modern artist to give expression to his inner vision … and has abandoned the concrete, natural and sensuous realms as well as the individual for the collective. What has remained individual is the unique way the art is expressed. What really matters is the direct encounter with the art. (Jung et al., 1964, p. 298) In this way, assemblage does not fit into the modern art paradigm except insofar as the processes in assemblage are direct encounters with object-­ symbols. By definition, assemblage art could be considered outsider art, a term coined by Roger Cardinal. In his 1972 book on the subject he wrote: I believe that a paramount factor in the critical definition of the creative outsider is that impulse in [an] that he or she should be possessed

48   The art of assemblage

of an expressive impulse and should then externalize unmonitored way which defies conventional art-­historical contextualization. (p. 68) Originally intended to describe the art of those outside of society, such as institutionalized persons, assemblage is now commonly used to describe art by self-­taught or naïve artists. Because these artists are not formally trained the works maybe judged by critics as childlike but Cardinal (1972) warns against assuming a lack of complexity in their work. As with assemblage artists, outsider artists may use conventional techniques but the artwork often involves assembling junk. A well-­known example of outsider art is Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles. It could be said with verity that this is art for and by the people. There is no need to make fine distinctions between assemblage and outsider art for the purposes of this study what is central is their shared adulation for the lost or found and revivification of the refuse object. Like outsider artists, assemblage artists do not abide by the rules of classical esthetic arts; there are no standardized methods. It is not confined to a single plane, museums, churches, or the elite. It is art that the proletariat can access and create.

Subjectivity of objects The art of assemblage has the effect of infusing objects with significance. Jungian Aniela Jaffe quotes influential Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky who imbues the object with more subjectivity: Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street.… Everything has a secret soul that is silent more often than it speaks. (Jung et al., 1964, p. 292) Though taken out of its original context, Kandinsky captures the essence of the subjectivity with which the assemblage artist views objects. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman echoes and deepens this perspective, “An object bears witness to itself in the image it offers, and its depth lies in the complexities of this image” (1981, p.  103). Jung (1921/1971) explains esthetic animation as a projection of inner processes onto outer objects to the extent that the object is assimilated to the subject and coalesces with him to such an  extent that he feels himself, as it were, in the object.… He does not,  however, feel himself projected into the object; rather, the

The art of assemblage   49

“empathized” object appears animated to him, as though it were speaking to him of its own accord. (p. 290) Working from this presupposition, assemblage art and its constituent objects occupy an important place in the human psyche. Jung developed his opinions on esthetics based on German art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s work, which divides art into two categories: abstraction and empathy. In 1908, Worringer’s formulated that: Just as the urge to empathy as a pre-­assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-­denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity. (1953/2014, p. 4) Worringer (1953/2014) writes that the urge to abstraction is “self-­ alienation—the need to get outside oneself. Through abstraction and in the contemplation of something immutable and necessary, we seek deliverance from the hazards of being human, from the seeming arbitrariness of ordinary organic existence” (p. 24). According to this distilled supposition, assemblage art potentiates significance in non-­sentient, de-­contextualized objects, thereby representing the principle of abstraction. Worringer was influenced by German psychologist and philosopher Theodore Lipps who may be best known for his conception of empathy (einfühlung). Lipps asserts that empathy is not only the means by which we mentally contact others but how we relate to works of art. In 1903 Lipps wrote: objectification of myself in an object distinct from myself.… By apperceiving an object, I experience, as though issuing from it or inherent in it as something apperceived, an impulse towards a particular mode of inner behaviour. This has the appearance of being communicated to me by the object. (p. 193) Within this idea, is the suggestion of the subjectivity of objects. Though described as having the appearance that an object can communicate, which may be likened to the concept of projection, a dialectical relationship has been established. Jung cites Worringer’s definition of the esthetic experience of empathy: esthetic enjoyment as objectified self-­enjoyment (p. 290). Per Jung, In the West, long tradition has established “natural beauty and veri­ similitude” as the criterion of beauty in art.… If the art form is opposed to life, if it is inorganic or abstract, we cannot feel our own life in it. (p. 291)

50   The art of assemblage

However, “another art-­principle undoubtedly exists, a style that is opposed to life that denies the will to live, but nevertheless lays a claim to beauty” (Worringer, 1953/2014, p.  14). On abstraction Jung (1921/1971) writes, the artist “presupposes that the object is alive and active, and seeks to withdraw from its influence. We must therefore suppose that abstraction is preceded by an unconscious act of projection which transfers negative contents to the object” (p. 292). Jung (1917/1928) expresses a clear prejudice against the abstract when he writes, “It is this fearful and sorrowful vision of the world that forces the Buddhist into his abstracting attitude.… The dynamic animation of the object as the impelling cause of abstraction is strikingly expressed in the Buddha’s symbolic language” (p. 294). He presumes the “abstracting type” avoids contact with the world as its “potent and dangerous objects” remind him of his impotence. “His psychology, therefore, is that of the under-­dog, whereas the empathetic type faces the world with confidence—its inert objects hold no terrors for him” (p. 295). Accordingly, as assemblage art might be considered as abstraction, it follows that Jung would consider the assemblage artist as fearful of the world of objects, rather than intimately connected with it, which triggers negative transferences onto objects. Despite his apparent bias toward empathetic art Jung writes, “both empathy and abstraction are needed for any real appreciation of the object as well as for artistic creation. Both are always present in every individual, though in most cases they are unequally differentiated” (Jung, 1921/1971, p. 296). Were it placed on a continuum, assemblage art might be opposite to the Buddhist mandalas, religious tributes created in sand to perfection only to be destroyed after completion, a ritual meant to represent the impermanent nature of life (Jung, 1974, p.  170). By the works, assemblage artists reveal an attachment to the objects of the world, glorifying the mundane; this is not consistent with the holy ideals of Judeo-­Christian morality, nor Jung’s empathy, nor the transcendental Buddhist view.

Chapter 4

Approaching shame

Whether shame is useful, organic, or universal is debatable, however, there is agreement that it has potential to harm the self and mitigating those impacts is beneficial to mental, emotional, and physical health. The approaches to treatment and its outcomes are as wide-­ranging and as varied as shame theories. A theme that prevails throughout the literature is that re-­owning disowned parts of the self is fundamental to healing shame (Kaufman, 1989; Lewis, 1971). Of course, the missing or disowned parts must be made conscious before they can be “redeemed and integrated” (Staples, 2009, p. 3). In broad terms, neuroses are treated in depth psychotherapy by making the unconscious, conscious. The methods for doing this are numerous but, in psychoanalysis, they generally include working with transferences. Free association and examining dream material are also common techniques of beckoning and understanding unconscious material. The manner and method of contacting these part selves appears to not only be rooted in theoretical orientation but also specific clinical experiences across populations and settings. For affect theorist Gershen Kaufman (1992): the central task of the life-­work can be construed as evolving a uniquely personal identity that gives inherent meaning to one’s life, provides direction and purpose to one’s work, and enables one’s self to retain a sense of inner worth and valuing in the face of all those vicissitudes of life with which we must contend, not the least of which are anxiety, suffering, and the lack of absolute control over our own lives. (p. 77) Kaufman (1992) writes that this lack of control “guarantees a perpetual vulnerability to shame” but shame should not be eradicated; rather we should learn to cope with it as he considers it universal and necessary (p.  77). Kaufman believes that the memory stores shame as scenes that must be recovered, made conscious, and relived as completely as possible so that the stored shame can be re-­experienced, but the challenge to do so lies in finding an entrance to the scene. Kaufman suggests that “earlier

52   Approaching shame

developmental phases of the self ” be “re-­contacted directly through active imagery”; alternatively, these earlier selves can be re-­contacted through gazing at old full-­face photographs (p. 211). Core to his theory is that the shame scene needs to be actively relived and repaired within the therapeutic relationship. Some specific techniques he advocates are instilling re-­ parenting images and positive affirmations in the patient. John Bradshaw, a forerunner in the recovery movement that defined mental health in the 1990s, advocates that “shamed-­based” people come out in a 12-step recovery model manner as he did, publically declaring himself a shame-­ based person, because, in his view, the way to address shame is to confront it by coming out of hiding—outing one’s self in front of an audience (White, Boyle, & Loveland, 2015). Of note is the context in which Bradshaw originally formulated and published this work. Bradshaw studied in the Catholic seminary and holds the priesthood (Clay, 2015). Though his work does not always overtly claim to be based in Christianity, much of his work relates to a god-­figure, which he refers to as a “higher power.” Relational psychotherapist Patricia DeYoung (2015), a contemporary of Bradshaw and fellow 12-Step advocate, suggests a relationship-­based approach that is sensitive to the potential for re-­shaming and even fragmentation could occur by calling out shame by name (p. 117). She writes that the therapist should establish a right-­brain connection with patients using affect attunement, empathic curiosity, and story-­making skills before confronting shame “as chronically shamed clients need interaction and engagement with their therapist so they can feel her as an embodied, emotional human being” (p. 117). DeYoung outlines several treatment guidelines, including prerequisites for therapists before working with shame, which are self-­evident and include: knowing your own shame; reading shame theory; creating a shame-­free frame; choosing a therapeutic stance that is de-­shaming; establishing a mentalizing/mindfulness stance; as well as playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy. This approach starkly contrasts with the radical self-­exposure and spiritual humility recommended by Bradshaw by placing empathy and human relationship at the core of treatment.

Depth psychology on the healing function of creativity Art therapy pioneer and social worker Maxine Junge (2010) attributes art therapy’s psychiatric and psychological foundations primarily to Freud and Jung; more specifically, Freud’s notion of the symbolic nature of the unconscious as represented in dreams and Jung’s emphasis on the primacy of the image and his concept of the collective unconscious are the “bedrock from which the profession evolved.” May (1975, p. 38) describes psychoanalytic views on creativity as “regression in service to the ego,” an expression of

Approaching shame   53

the neurotic. Von Franz (1980) presupposes that impermeability that can be encountered with regard to the unconscious is a lack of the receptivity of theses contents rather than Freud’s idea of repression (p. 88). Notwithstanding, there are accounts of both men using art in analysis with patients, though not extensively. Jung believed unconscious libidinal impulses should be transformed into helpful elements as opposed to being sublimated as Freud suggested (Whitmont, 1969, p. 296). Also in comparison to Freud, Jung conceptualized the libido as creative energy not a purely sexual drive (Chodorow, 1991, p. 48). Their successors continue to formulate creative approaches to psychotherapy largely derivative of the work of Freud’s work on dreams and Jung’s active imagination. Encapsulating what active imagination was for Jung is a complex task. Jung himself struggled to settle on the term active imagination for his method. The origin of Jung’s active imagination is ascribed to his personal struggles following his break with Freud, his efforts to self-­heal, and the ensuing development of a relationship with his own creative spirit (Chodorow, 1997). The work of Jung and post-­Jungians is the focus of this section. Jungian Marie-­Louise von Franz (1997) described active imagination as a “meditation on fantasies, in which one relates to the unconscious as to a real partner” (p. 333). She goes to say that it could be compared to Zen Buddhism or tantra yoga with the main difference being that active imagination has no goal and that it is a “solitary experiment of a free individual with himself or herself, devoid of any tendency to steer the unconscious” (p.  334). Staples (2009) writes that Jung’s active imagination allows us to personify the rejected opposites, shadow figures, so we can “recover them and make them available to the ego and consciousness without necessarily having to act them out” (p. 40). By these explanations, it appears that corporeality, making art objects is an activity apart from this liminal space of reverie. Notwithstanding, many of his successors have used the term and the notion of active imagination to encompass many forms of expression such as authentic movement (Chodorow, 1997) and automatic writing (von Franz, 1997; Perera, 1986). Jungian analyst Verena Kast (1989/1993) emphasized that, though active imagination has come to be associated mainly with an imaginative picture in a waking state, and an active examination of this image.… Active imagination covers every rendition of a symbol, be it a visual continuation of a symbol in the imagination or, more descriptively, a painted picture or sculpted representation. (p. 166) Edward Whitmont (1969, p.  294) explains that a Jungian approach to healing is based on an ongoing conversation between the conscious ego and the unconscious in which the psychic products can be concretized

54   Approaching shame

through artistic expressions. For Jung, active imagination is only a method that allows us to differentiate between our selves and unconscious contents, but the transcendent function comprises a method and an inborn function of the psyche, which mediates opposites (Chodorow, 1997). In an essay on the transcendent function, two applicable methods of contending with emotional disturbances are described: by way of understanding and by way of creative formulation. One method of dealing with an intrusive mood is elaboration, to develop a picture of what elements comprise the mood in the unconscious. The point of this activity is the “enrichment and clarification of the affect,” which “creates a new situation since the previously unrelated affect has become more or less an articulate idea” (Jung, 1969d, p.  82). This cooperation between the conscious and the unconscious is the beginning of the transcendent function. Alternatively, the disturbance can be addressed by giving it visual shape; the mood can be expressed through drawing or painting. Swiss psychoanalyst Léon Wurmser (1995) suggests that shame can be transcended as, “Creativity is a form of love with strong narcissistic aspects” (p.  293) and that in the throes of it one “may at least for a moment overcome that mortal woundedness in the core of the self ” (p. 299). Jung attributed all creative works to the imagination at play. Jung states that whether the picture is technically or esthetically satisfying is unimportant as the value lies in the fantasy and free play. Artistic play allows us to experiment with forms, to create functions and meanings, to “dissolve and recreate something which our one-­sided utilitarian has, until now, prevented us from deciphering” (Whitmont, 1993). For Jung (1969d), this product embodies the “striving of the unconscious for the light and the striving on the conscious for substance” (p.  83). Art allows a person to work at edges in order to process intensities that most people cannot bear. Perera (1986) writes that creative expression serves as a “vessel for the containment and taming” (p.  29) of the demonic energies that grip the scapegoat-­identified person. In her clinical experience, she found that patients took one of two channels toward healing: one of which is turning “creative expression into some vessel of art” (p.  87). It should be stated that though Jung recognized the unconscious as containing the potential for self-­healing, he warned against its destructive elements (Whitmont, 1969, p.  295). He advised that active imagination had the potential to possess the personality and even lead to psychosis. Von Franz (1980) writes that archetypes are the source of creativity by way of emotionally charged images in the collective unconscious, “if that activated content can be translated into communicable language beneficial creative inspirations may result” (p. 105). Von Franz (1980) then warns that, alternatively, this activated archetypal imagery can lead to “morbid disorientation phenomena” (p.  105), which in Jungian terms, are demonic works, whereby overwhelmingly powerful unconscious content appears on the threshold of

Approaching shame   55

consciousness and takes possession of the personality. Jaffe writes that once in action, the unconscious may become overpowering and destructive if left to itself without a response from human consciousness; furthermore, it can even destroy its own gifts (Jung et al., 1964). A person must have capacity to resist being overcome and through reflection attempt to become conscious of its meaning, “the demonic, therefore, would be the creative in statu nascendi, not yet realized, or made real, by the ego” (p. 297). This is the main thrust that differentiates the person who can make meaning of these unconscious forces through the creation of art and the person who is subsumed by them. Analyst Ann Ulanov (2013) examines the healing function of creativity through a Jungian lens and offers another perspective. Though she does not refer to shame directly, her concept of madness shares many of shame’s qualities; most notably, ruptures in the self and the attendant remoteness from community. She writes that “madness on the way to recovery digs up parts of us left in the shadow that are unadapted, still archaic, so that we feel as bizarre to ourselves as we appear to others” (p.  8). Ulanov states that this is the very “primitive energy” we need to retrieve. The Red Book gives us access to Jung’s own discourse with creativity and madness. Though not intended to serve as a guide to healing through creativity, “The Red Book bolsters our courage to look into our madness, to see what is there and not there for us” (p. 8). Ulanov advocates against approaching madness in a conventional clinical manner because she believes labeling people with diagnosis pushes them further into isolation and because madness is more-­than-personal, it is communal (p.  8). “What promotes healing,” Ulanov writes, “includes knowing that our particular suffering partakes of human suffering” (p. 9). Here she introduces the idea of locating the personal (i.e., subjective psyche) and relating it to the impersonal (i.e., objective psyche), asserting that placing ourselves in the larger human community relieves us of personal isolation and humiliation that madness brings: it “restores dignity” as we are working on our version of a global human problem. Neumann (1959/1966) also speaks to this restorative capacity, “Wherever a complex of the ‘personal unconscious’ has led to an achievement, the personality has succeeded spontaneously or reactively in going beyond the ‘merely personal and familiar’ element in the complex to attain collective significance, i.e., to become creative” (p. 157).

Art as a therapeutic practice To provide a background context, art therapy began as a loose collection of individuals from varied backgrounds who invented or discovered ways to use art in the service of others. “Before training programs, each of these art therapists, in their own idiosyncratic ways, provided art as a voice for the unheard and forgotten” (Allen, 1995, p.  v). Early pioneers worked

56   Approaching shame

among institutionalized children, psychiatric inmates, and the inhabitants of state hospital back wards (Allen, p. v). Junge (2010, p. 11) writes that “Outsider” art, that is, art created by psychiatric patients, and self-­taught artists in the early twentieth century, influenced the development of art therapy. In this way, early efforts in art therapy relate well to assemblage art. Its continued popularity alone validates its effectiveness; however, art therapy has no exclusive claim on using art to heal psychological wounds. Many have found self-­directed creative projects to be therapeutic, for example, Jung’s active imagination method. Staples (2009) writes, “Creativity in all its myriad expressions … is a potent healer … it helps restore the wounded parts and integrate them into a cohesive structure” (p. 3). He further states that no method of healing is as effective as creative work and, like Jung; he felt it made no difference whether the work was objectively good in terms of artistic standards (p. 10). As previously established, shame grips not only the mind but it pitches a person into a nearly unbearable embodied experience—it is non-­ conceptual, it does not respond to words or even thoughts; chronic shame leads one to isolation and alienation from self and other. Junge (2010) captures the healing capacity of art when she writes: Art offers an embodied means for reclaiming identities that have been distorted, marginalized, and rejected. It provides the opportunity to be seen not through the lens oppression, but through a reconstructed identity authored by the one who had previously been the object of the gaze. (p. 106) One of shame’s primary characteristics is fear of being seen compelling a person into hiding and withdrawal from engagement. She goes on to quote the following: “The experience of being seen through the metaphor of the art piece creates a link between the artist and the outside world. This experience of being witnessed by others via one’s artwork has internal healing power for the artist” (Junge, p. 106). The idea of re-­engaging with the world as a way to heal shame has been touted by others; however, art provides an important interface between the vulnerable shamed self and the inherent risks of exposing one’s shame. “Art provides a channel for communication and gives visual permission for viewers to face issues from which they are accustomed to turning away” (Junge, 2010, p.  106). Art making provides opportunity to communicate what might otherwise be unspeakable. As discussed above, genuine spontaneity is problematic for a person paralyzed by shame and perfectionism. Shame prevents us from conversing directly about the experience however much we long to give it voice (Kaufman, 1992, p. 9). Jungian analyst Aldo Carotenuto writes that when

Approaching shame   57

there are no words adequate to voice one’s sense of alienation, art permits us another way to express it (1989, p.  92). Perera (1986) writes that the scapegoat-­identified person cannot initially see the potential for redemption in those self-­aspects that have been discarded; aligning with negative qualities the scapegoat-­identified person is at “at home with garbage” (p. 88). Perera describes the scapegoat as a border figure between the conscious and the unconscious that is called to confront and redeem material that is repressed by the culture (p. 102). The work is to find the value in the refuse, to sort and humanize it, to be improvisational as well as intentional in creating new order. Whitmont (1993, p.  32) writes that chaos possesses its own order. Found objects used in art making have hybrid identities; aspects of former lives are embedded in the objects even as they are reshaped into something new (Moon, 2010). The transformation of found objects from the ordinary into the extraordinary can be meaningful for clients who feel helpless, worthless, worn, ill, or anonymous. Through sorting, selecting, arranging, and attaching, clients can build confidence in their ability to make decisions and commitments (Seiden, 2001). As previously written, there is a common notion that connecting to the disowned parts of the self is fundamental to healing shame. “Creative work helps us see these unconscious parts and come to know them again. Our art is a projection of our self, and by learning to interpret it, we can find ourselves in it, the acceptable and unacceptable opposites” (Staples, 2009, p.  3). Assemblage art might be conceptualized as a concretized way of re-­ assembling symbols of the self. An assemblage might serve as a self-­symbol, as re-­membered and re-­collected selves that form a new composite body.

Processes in assemblage art Because assemblage art does not require conventional artistic skills or materials and cannot truly be evaluated by classic esthetic standards, this has the dual potential of creating a sense of freedom from existing criteria and a sense of overwhelm at the boundless possibilities that freedom allows. The materials are found, not made by the artist, the process of assembling is developing a composition of previously unrelated objects that is satisfying to the artist; there is no template, and the methods of physically connecting the objects are novel problems to be resourcefully solved through any means available to the artist; be it nails, screws, welding, adhesives, and so on. Unlike traditional painting, drawing, and sculpting, assemblage art does not confront the artist with a blank canvas, paper, or lump of earthen matter. There is no true tabula rasa. The mediums of assemblage, the objects, have already been formed and pre-­exist outside the artist’s awareness until found. To be found is to be discovered and the assemblage artist is adept at noticing physical objects of the outer world, particularly those that are de-­contextualized. To be visually seen, however,

58   Approaching shame

does not likely evoke enough desire to be taken up and given a place in an assemblage piece, the object must also be assigned some level of value that differentiates it from other matter. The artist’s noticing and valuation, whether conscious or somewhat unconscious, combined with the found object is the raw material of this art form. Noticing requires an alertness that is gentler than vigilance and more energetic than looking. It is possible to drive home on the same streets hundreds of times over the course of years and not notice the specific details of your route. If the mind is focused on the destination or too intently on the traffic ahead, if the eyes and ears are fixated on only the things that pertain directly to the drive home then what happens next, a form of tunnel vision dominates the psychic and sensual field. The type of noticing involved in spotting what may be dismissed or even invisible to an agenda-­driven mind, focused on the future becomes accessible when the senses are open and receptive to the unexpected and the subtle. While assemblage art is a form of self-­ expression and has potential for healing wounds to the self, it also has the effect of offsetting a hyper focus on the self. The process of finding objects, composing or playing with the objects, and constructing an assemblage piece compels an outward look at the material world, asking for solutions to unique problems, and at the same time, active engagement with one’s internal responses. Jungian Marie-­Louise von Franz (1980) writes: Only an inwardly open, “naïve” attitude to the conscious on the one hand and an honest, conscientious, and painstaking devotion on the part of ego-­consciousness on the other can bring the creative contents of the unconscious matrix successfully over the threshold into consciousness. Play, with neither a plan nor purpose, is the best precondition. (p. 89) How and why artists find their raw material varies as much as their art products. Aniela Jaffe describes Spanish painter Joan Miro’s morning ritual of going to the beach at dawn to collect “things lying there, waiting for someone to discover their personality” (p.  291) the artist assembles the found objects in a manner that is even surprising to him (Jung et al., 1964). Kurt Schwitters assembled pictures from bus tickets, labels buttons, and other refuse which he collected in his pockets as he walked in the streets (Seitz, 1961). On the creative process Neumann (1989) writes, “openness” arises in the space “between the ego and the self which gives access to creative agency” he further states that the “freedom from fixity” is as applicable to creating art as it is to “creating and forming the self ” (p. 372). It invites the artist to become immersed in art making. In essence, immersion is merging with the activity being performed. Positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996) is credited with identifying “flow,” a state of being completely absorbed in an activity, especially an activity that

Approaching shame   59

involves creativity. While in the flow, people feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities” (p. 110). Marion Woodman (1984) writes: Through body awareness, the density of matter is infiltrated by Light so that the individual, instead of lugging about a heap of dark flesh, experiences the calm, rich wisdom of the conscious body, and the authenticity of the transpersonal love that impregnates Being. Redeemed matter is the container confident enough and flexible enough to magnify the creative imagination. (p. 36) In her essay on modern art, Jungian Aniela Jaffe illustrates the paradigm of spirit over and above matter from the point of view that matter should be transformed; matter in and of its self is not contain sufficient meaning. She refers to the hermetic Christian brotherhoods of the Middle Ages and of the alchemists, who conferred “the dignity of their religious contemplation” onto the “stuff of the earth” (Jung et al., 1964, p.  291). She also writes that Schwitters elevated the “grossest material to the rank of art,” including his “cathedral” built for things; in so doing, he employed the basic tenet of alchemy, that the “precious object is to be found in the filth” (p. 291). Jaffe quotes Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico: Every object has two aspects: the common aspect, which is the one we generally see and which is seen by everyone; and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals see at moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation. A work of art must relate something that does not appear in its physical form. (p. 292) Chirico speaks directly to the exclusivity of traditional fine arts, not only by uplifting art to the spiritual realm but also by claiming that its full meaning is only accessible by the few. Jaffe keeps the earth tied to shadow material when she writes, “the artists, like the alchemists, probably did not realize that they projected their own darkness, their earthly shadow, a psychic content that they and their time had lost and abandoned” on to matter. As such, it is “psychological fact” that objects are receptacles for human projection, devoid of their own subjectivity” (Jung et al., 1964, p.  292). Jung defined projection as unconscious transfer of subjective psychic elements onto an outer object with just enough of a “hook” to hang onto (von Franz, 1980, p.  3). Meaning, though projection derives from the projector’s psyche, there must be something, even if miniscule, that the object of projection (i.e., the projectee) possesses. In the case of found objects, the objects we notice can be thought of as those things with

60   Approaching shame

enough of a hook to get our attention and trigger a projection. Staples (2009) writes that we are reflected in our projections; creative work mirrors us for the simple reason that we can see projected in it, if we look and interpret carefully, our own psychological and spiritual selves (p. 11). In terms of healing, he further states, “Mirrors in all their manifold guises help restore the wounded self ” (p. 11). There are feelings embedded within us and in the creative process an “unconscious knowingness” connects the disparate shards of life and lead to a greater unity” (p. 14). As such, if creating personal artwork can facilitate dialogue with the shamed aspects of our selves, it has the potential for healing.

Chapter 5

Shame and self-­expression A heuristic study

“In heuristic research the investigator must have had a direct, personal encounter with the phenomenon being investigated. There must have been actual autobiographical connections” (Moustakas, 1990, p. 14). The decision to utilize a heuristic approach came with great resistance. I did not want the dissertation to read like I was extolling my personal issues under the guise of academic research. What I came to understand was that I was ashamed of my own story, my own feelings, my own experiences, and my own authority. Furthermore, I was far from alone in this experience. When I recognized shame in me and was able to identify its impacts, evidence of it appeared everywhere in my life and in many guises—in my yoga classes, in café conversations I eavesdropped on, in my friends’ eyes, in the media—trebly “normal” such that it did not appear to be shame. It was convenient to dismiss this as projection but, as was written in the clinical discussion and reinforced in the literature review of this study, we do live in a shame-­laden society. The paucity of first-­hand accounts of living with and through shame despite this, subverted my doubts about whether to consider my autobiography as valid research. How this particular study on shame and self-­expression developed is germane to the heuristic investigation as it explicates a process of self-­expression that addresses personal and more-­than-personal shame. The overarching trajectory of this process can be tracked as one that began with a person whose artistic voice was walled up behind a thick barrier of shame and reached a satisfactory, but not final, end with the ability to create and share artwork. Note that this development was not a linear progression but a circuitous route. As such, Moustakas’ phases were not encountered in any special order nor did my experiences fall into discrete phases. This account describes the process as I lived it and as it occurred to my psyche.

Review of my own treatment Although this is not a clinical study, what I learned in psychotherapy factors into my approach to art making as means to heal shame. As a

62   Shame and self-expression

patient struggling with issues of identity, depression, and anxiety my therapist to advised me to “be creative.” I believe he recommended that in earnest, not imagining there could be a negative response to a therapeutic intervention that was likely successful in the past. However, for me this remedy was wholly unhelpful. I would plead with him to tell me what to do to become creative, to tell me how to find my alleged creativity. In response he would offer empathic listening and reflecting but would give me no directives or instruction I could physically implement. Eventually, I lashed out at him in frustration declaring this intervention a failure and the conversation about my creativity was archived. My incapacity to “be creative” became more fodder for self-­punishment, feelings of personal failure and inadequacy, hopelessness about my ability to heal, and creative paralysis. I can see after years of training to be a psychotherapist myself that his approach was to make a safe, gentle place with plenty of space to find my own way. Like many therapists and for good reason, he avoided telling me what to do so as not to overly direct my therapeutic process. There is wisdom in that therapeutic choice. There is a threshold for how much space each person can tolerate and thrive within, beyond that, the very freedom that supports development becomes a source of immense anxiety. Space is anathema to a person shackled by shame but shame never came up in all my years in therapy. What he directed me to, without using clinical terms like dissociation or diagnostic categories like borderline personality, was a scarcely unconscious split in my personality. I was directed to name the two main players in my personality and keep a journal to track their moves. Over time, I was able to discern who I was being—or who was being me. Based on that time combined with clinical experience, I wrote the following journal entry:

Autobiography of splitting: the unbearable tension of opposites Where are we going mommy? Outta here! Is daddy coming with us? No it’s just us. Now hurry up and grab your stuff! Fiona had just finished kindergarten when her mother packed up all she could fit in a Pinto station wagon and left her father. She never asked why they were leaving; she didn’t have to. Fiona sat in the passenger seat, leaned her head against the window, and closed her eyes. She saw her father’s stiffened back, right arm pulling back and driving toward her mother’s coiled up body—stuffed in that space between the toilet and the tub. This would not have happened if she had not been crying “Mommy” relentlessly outside the bathroom door, driving her father into a fury. She was only two and doing what comes naturally to a toddler but she could not shirk the

Shame and self-expression   63

blame. Fiona imagined the excuses her mother must have had to make to the doctors and nurses to protect him. She imagined the disheartened face of the police officer that would come to her mother’s bedside to investigate as he sighed helplessly, shaking his head, but only on the inside. That officer had likely seen this one over and over again—battered woman protects partner at her peril! Now at age 28, when she thought of the traumatic events of her childhood, Fiona questioned whether it was real, if all of her recollections actually happened. She feared her mind had distorted her memory too badly to make such a determination. After all, years of her life had disappeared. She thought of filling out a job application last week. It asked for a list of previous addresses and schools she had attended. Unable to recall, her face filled with blood and her head with synaptic pain, she ripped the application to shreds. She told herself that next time she would just make shit up. There was no way to know the truth and she wondered what the fuck it mattered now anyway. Why need she remember, was it not obvious by her constant anxiety, depression, and the self-­damaging behavior of her teens, that something pretty damn horrible had happened? If that was not evidence enough, her two best friends were a true testament to her trauma—Alex and Joan. She met Alex and Joan after she left a perfectly suitable husband and all the trappings of the life she had idealized for so long for a stranger she met in a bar. Fiona begged herself not to do it, to do anything else—not this! She called her therapist to talk about her inexplicable sense of despair and she saw a psychiatrist who monitored her anti-­depressants. When she told her therapist that she felt like part of her was dying and that she wanted to leave, he advised her to start telling her husband how she really felt; he said she would need to let him truly see her. He said, if she was to ever feel totally loved by anyone, she would have to be seen. As she envisioned exposing her disgusting inner contents, an overwhelming surge of fear possessed her—she sat down, dizzy and sick to her stomach. Telling her husband that she felt sexually dead with him, that she wanted to be with someone else, and that she had been hiding her doubts about their relationship, was completely intolerable. He would hate her, maybe even hurt her, and ultimately reject and abandon her. No, this was a risk she absolutely would not take. This loss of approval and love would annihilate her. Instead of revealing herself, whatever semblance of self that was, she went to bed with the stranger—a broken down man that was in town to golf, drink until unconscious, and mourn the suicide of his best friend. Being with him went against every conscious belief that she had about what is right and wrong in a marriage; yet something was happening inside that was too compelling to walk away from. More compelling than her own morality. He fed her fantasies of freedom and total self-­expression. He made her feel that life was magical and that she could not possibly stay with her husband and fulfill the

64   Shame and self-expression

innate call to live a real life. She became inflated, manic, and convinced that the only option was to destroy any hope for her marriage in the only way she knew how—betrayal. Less than three months had passed since their wedding when she cheated; the wedding gifts had not even been opened. She loved her wedding, it was intimate, fun, and her friends and family flew almost 10,000 miles across the pond to be there. The day was perfect. The days before and after were perfect. It was a celebration for everyone—except his mother who wanted him to marry an actual princess. Nobody knew the struggles they had at home and specifically, what was not working in the bedroom. So perplexing were her actions that her own family, particularly her mother and sister, turned her away outright. With wild contempt, they rallied everyone they could to make sure that nobody helped her, that she learn her lesson, that she realize what a disgusting embarrassment she was. Fiona was painted into a corner, with no support she stayed all day in the actor’s hotel room, high with the chemical reaction that came with all the drama and infatuation. He was her only choice now. He would drive her to the City of Lost Angeles where she could try to claim a so-­called life. Once in Los Angeles, it did not take long for Fiona to realize that the actor cared nothing for her, their fusion was broken. He had won, he convinced her to leave her husband and had no further use for her. A huge void opened up inside and she felt utterly, unbearably alone. She was carless, homeless, and jobless; she had lost 15 pounds from her already thin body. In her mania, she had no need for food; in her stress, she could not ingest it anyway. With heavy shame and abject desperation, she contacted old friends, friends that she had no real need for when she was married. Apparently, Fiona had shone enough of her powerful light on her friends in the past because they let her crash on their couches. She did odd, sometimes semi-­humiliating jobs, crying herself to sleep nightly and sobbing hopelessly whenever she was alone. Guilt and shame became her diseases. Why she could not control herself!? Why had she done this to her husband, her family, and herself!? What is wrong with me!? Who does this to a person!? Obsessive, relentless rumination cycled constantly through her mind until one indelible session she had with her therapist; he told her about the concept of splitting, that people who survive trauma often split off aspects of themselves in order to survive psychologically. It sounded to her like, what used to be called, multiple personality disorder. She thought of the infamous movie about Sybil and she was no Sybil. Just as she thought that, her mother’s voice rang in her ears “Sybil!” She dismissed that quickly and tried to understand how she could possibly be splitting when she generally remembered who she was and what she did. It was not as though she went into a fully altered state and became another entity that somehow used her body as a host to do its bidding without her knowledge. At the same time, some part of this made sense but if this was so, why had he never told her of

Shame and self-expression   65

splitting before?! She had seen the same therapist for years, maybe if he told her she could have stopped herself. She was on the attack for their next appointment but as they talked, it became clear that she could not or would not hear it before now. Patiently, her therapist explained that splitting is not necessarily multiple personality disorder, currently referred to as dissociative identity disorder, and gave her examples of how and when she split. He pointed out that she could go into a mode that allowed her to be adventurous, take risks, but also disconnect from her feelings and engage in dangerous, sometimes destructive, behavior. He also pointed out that there was a companion to that personality, which was depressive, needy, frightened, and overly affective. Over the course of several sessions, Fiona bought in and he had her name the “personalities.” She settled on Alex and Joan, having a preference toward Alex for being the bold one. She picked the name Joan because she hated that name. Accordingly, Alex made messes and Joan cleaned them up while she, Fiona, mostly hid to avoid the massive pendulum swing—if unconsciously. She did not have the strength to consciously relate to those powerful personalities. In Jung’s observations of his cousin Helene, a young female medium, he noted that the characteristics of the deceased relatives she was channeling were actually representations of disavowed aspects of her personality. This and his study of Reine, a 19-year old model, led him to the supposition that split off contents of the unconscious can be personified and experienced by an individual as hallucinations or that they could seize control of their conscious mind (Ellenberger, 1970, p.  691). His finding was that for both mediums, the material that came forth in their entranced sessions was an expression of repressed desires. In the case of Helene, it was a way to express herself, or for the unconscious to express itself, in the face of internal and external obstacles to her psychic development. In the case of Reine, it was understood that it was her way of dealing with the desire she had for the painter she modeled for. Though not a medium per se, it is apparent that Fiona used alternate, supplementary, possibly compensatory, personalities to navigate some of the movements in her life. She became embodied by Alex and Joan in an almost somnambular manner; whereas, there was a certain unconsciousness, an unreality to her thoughts and actions. In the case of Fiona, the question must be asked then, what was repressed that Alex and Joan allowed her to express? It has been established that Fiona experienced childhood trauma and dissociation is a commonly accepted coping mechanism. An argument could be made that Fiona suffered post–traumatic stress attributable to more than one event. One might imagine that Fiona did not experience emotional intimacy in the family system or witness it between her mother and father. In that violent setting, with a battered mother unable to protect her, and the threat of pain, possibly even death by her father, very  few of the qualities that most therapists would agree support the

66   Shame and self-expression

development of a central identity would be available (e.g., security, nurturing, psychic space). It is conceivable that Alex and Joan emerged to protect the vulnerable self; thus, rather than have a cohesive identity, Fiona split off into three distinct identities. Alex would not feel the pain or fear so she could move Fiona forward in life: however, because the feelings had to go somewhere; Joan allowed Fiona’s underlying rage to express as depression. One way of conceptualizing Fiona’s abandonment of her marriage, and the thinking she and her family took on, was that she self-­sabotaged. Demonstrated by her feelings of guilt and her family’s shame and blame, it is apparent that they were in agreement that Fiona was at fault, that she sabotaged her life. With this set of beliefs, what Fiona did via Alex’s acting out was a conscious act of destruction: all shadow, no light; all wrong, no right. From this perspective, there is no redemption, no value to the soul and its journey, and no validation of the possible intelligence of unconsciousness she acted out of. That is to say, it was not considered that Alex and Joan could be thought of as semi-­autonomous psychic figures, each with their own purpose, worth, and destiny. Central to Jungian theory, is the idea of the tension of opposites, enantiodromia, which is, interpreted loosely, the acting out of the unconscious against the conscious. This concept has application to Fiona’s situation. Because her psyche was largely dominated by Alex and Joan, she was either in a somewhat manic state or a depressive state most of the time, vacillating between poles. While married, she was depressed and felt like part of her was dying, which indicates that she was in a Joan position. It follows then that Alex would be dormant, subdued, repressed, during Joan’s occupation. It also follows that Joan would be the dominant personality in a marriage because Alex did not attach and her character traits would not be conducive to a committed, traditional relationship. Thus, Fiona’s personality and marriage had one-­sided quality, creating a dynamic whereby the other side, Alex, was building steam as she would have to fight intensely for her place in Fiona so as not to be annihilated. The symbolic death of Alex would have left Fiona with only Joan to go to, or maybe even more frightening, it would have left her alone with herself with no other coping mechanisms. It would have been the psychological equivalent to having one’s arm chopped off. Without Alex, Fiona could be usurped by Joan who was completely enmeshed in her relationship with her husband. Though not a pretty scene, not an ideal ending, it was crucial to Fiona’s perceived survival to leave her marriage by way of Alex. In Jung’s essay On the Nature of the Psyche (1969), he writes the following, “The ego keeps its integrity only if it does not identify with one of the opposites, and if it understands how to hold the balance between them. This is possible only if it remains conscious of both at once.” It has been established that Fiona was not consciously aware of her opposites, Alex and Joan, when she left her married life—or at any time before. Therefore, it would not be possible to hold them in balance. Instead of recognizing and

Shame and self-expression   67

balancing their existence, she would vacillate between them, each one taking turns with no conscious communication between them. As such her central identity (ego) could not maintain its integrity. Regarding the ego, Jung (1969a) describes it as something that “should not be altered unless one wants to bring on pathological disturbances,” including neurotic dissociations; he goes on to say that from this pathological position, attempts at integration manifest as “violent interruptions of unconscious contents into consciousness.” For Jung, the objective then, if there is to be one, would be to integrate the unconscious material into the conscious mind, thereby making a personal whole. In order to accomplish this, one must brazen out the unconscious components of the personality (Jung, 1946/1969e). Considering Fiona, it was necessary that Alex and Joan be made conscious so that she might have a chance at integration. Jung (1969a, pp.  224–225) discusses how one’s ego may react to such an outburst depending on its relative strength: a strong ego assimilates the unconscious material, leading to individuation, and a weak ego is assimilated by it, resulting in the darkening of ego-­consciousness. Fiona’s sudden departure and reckless abandonment of reason and regard for her well-­being could well be an example of Jung’s violent interruption, in which Alex effectively vitalized yet overpowered Fiona. Based on the theory that ego strength is necessary for assimilation and assimilation is necessary for self-­realization, Fiona’s task would be to develop the requisite ego strength so that she might become integrated lest she identify with Alex or Joan resulting in an “abaissement du niveau mental.” Jung was very concerned about the loss of the ego to unconsciousness and feared that identification with preconscious wholeness could yield disastrous results. He offers advice to those who feel they may fall to prey to such identification, that advice being meditation on a picture of St. Christopher, a martyr, else a “nebulous superman with a puffed up ego and deflated self ” will ensue. It is tempting here to explore what this fear was for Jung personally, especially after the release of the Red Book. With respect to Fiona, it is conceivable that Alex could become that overblown personality, relegating the self to a highly subjugated position indefinitely. This is where Joan’s role becomes crucial. Joan is not dissimilar to St. Christopher. Martyrdom can be defined as extreme suffering, which Fiona subjected herself to by way of Joan every time Alex acted out. So long as there was a Joan to bare suffering, the full actualization of Alex could not occur. In a sense then, because Fiona kept both Joan and Alex alive, she protected herself from being cannibalized by one or the other. While she did not have conscious knowledge of Alex and Joan, had Fiona stayed in her marriage, unable or unwilling to be her full self, which would include allowing Alex to be experienced by her husband, she may have identified with the preconscious wholeness of Joan. In that event, it would have been a figurative suicide for Alex and, thus, partially herself. Whereas,

68   Shame and self-expression

her behavior as Alex looked to be self-­sabotaging on one time, it could be that it was at the same time self-­preservation. Without the psychic break that occurred due to her divorce, it is undetermined as to if or when these crucial unconscious aspects of Fiona’s personality would have surfaced. As previously discussed, for Jung, the surfacing and integration of Alex and Joan is fundamental to wholeness. To continue along these lines, the work for Fiona is to become acquainted with Alex and Joan and to start the process of integration. One vital step is to distinguish between the ego and the self as Jung’s self is “infinitely more than mere ego,” and individuation is coming-­ to-be of the self, which is beyond ego-­consciousness (Jung, 1946/1969e). My interpretation is that both are necessary and related processes, whereas the ego is an essential component of consciousness and the self is the core entity in which the ego communicates with and resides. Alex and Joan are conceivably outward expressions of unconscious material. Since they have been recognized as such, work on understanding their telos’ and potentially accepting consciously them as part of Fiona. Choice is a function of consciousness. Before Fiona was conscious of Alex and Joan, she could not exercise her own volition in a successful enduring manner. By seeing the specific functions and inherent values that Alex and Joan have brought to Fiona’s survival and maybe life’s purpose, she could start to co-­opt them for herself consciously as opposed to being bandied about by them. Armed with knowledge of these characters, how will she proceed? One might imagine that the split which resulted in the development of two somewhat sophisticated and useful personalities, may take some time to integrate. The acknowledgment and assimilation of the traits and powers Alex and Joan possess could reduce the need for either of them to take control of Fiona’s ego. An overarching treatment goal is for Fiona to remain in driver’s seat of consciousness more of the time, calling on Alex and Joan in intentional ways. It is clear that Fiona’s attempts to suppress aspects of herself were not sustainable. We also observed that limited communication and acceptance of the unconscious does violence in terms of integration and wholeness. Once her ego takes on a more cohesive form, she may, like Jung (1961), decide to gradually initiate deeper contact with the unconscious, experiencing the feelings that she and others deemed unacceptable, the emotions she had tried to stifle or deny. For me, this approach, this framework discussed above, is gentler to the person experiencing a split as the focus is not blaming or pathologizing as much as it is bringing it to the awareness of the individual so as to assist in achieving a sense of wholeness. We ask the unconscious what it wants in a certain way. We validate its existence rather than suppress or deny it.

Erich Fromm (1941/1994, p.  4) raised pertinent questions about freedom including whether the desire for it is part of human nature; he

Shame and self-expression   69

divides freedom into two categories, “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Freedom from, or negative freedom, refers to the point in human development when actions are no longer being dictated solely by instincts. Fromm (1941/1994, p. 32) describes this type of freedom as an “ambiguous gift” that can lead to an experience of aloneness and anxiety: whereas, spontaneous relation through genuine expression of love and work, which allows for both oneness and independence, characterizes freedom to, or positive freedom. For Fromm, because freedom from something can create insecurity due to a sense of isolation, it takes on a negative quality unless that energy is moved into relationship with “man and nature” (p.  29). If this transition does not occur successfully then one seeks out security through various means; one of which is to subjugate one’s freedom to conformity to avoid freethinking. Fromm demonstrates this through analyses and explanations of oppressive cultural, religious, and social structures; he asserts that one’s level of inner freedom, which is equated with freedom to, is positively correlated to one’s level of external freedom. Accordingly, a person would need to have achieved positive freedom (freedom to); a sense of security and relatedness, in order to embark upon what Jung referred to as “a great adventure of the spirit” (1954/1969a, p. 169). The purpose of discussing Fromm’s ideas about freedom here is to consider that there may be something in human nature that makes for a complex, sometimes paradoxical, relationship to freedom. Because, on its face, the concept of freedom seems like a universally good thing; it should follow then that something (creativity in this case) that could contribute to our freedom would be positively regarded. Is there any greater mental freedom than that which is possible in the boundless realm of the unconscious; any greater freedom than creative expression? This is the crux of the issue; the boundlessness of the creative unconscious is in conflict with the human need for containment. For the shamed person, there is no freedom. The unknown represents possibility, unpredictability, and whatever a person can project onto the vast field of potentiality. This proposition affects us each individually and is likely contingent on features including one’s psychological situation and spiritual or religious beliefs. If an unconscious realm exists and its contents can never be fully known, then all of what we think we know is called to question and nothing is certain. One might imagine that the limitless creativity of the unconscious could be threatening to someone who is invested in, maybe even comforted by, what feels solid and concrete. As such, it would be prudent to provide some guidance or scaffolding when suggesting that a patient, especially an anxious patient, without a conscious relationship to creativity, “be creative.” It seems naïve or ignorant to send someone blindly into this encounter with unconscious material supposing that only good can come from it. It is plausible that a person providing such advice does not accept the hypothesis of the unconscious and/or is

70   Shame and self-expression

unaware of its dangers. As discussed in the literature review of this study, Jung warned against being incorporated by the unconscious based on his personal and clinical experience with creative activity. At the same time, he recognized the un-­mined potential of this dark domain. His relationship to the unconscious was one of ambivalence and paradox. Also as discussed in the literature review, neither Freud nor Jung dove deeply into exploring shame and shame has been undervalued in terms of its impacts on mental health. I was awarded a Master’s degree in clinical psychology without knowing what shame was or, closer to the heart, without knowing that I lived with a crippling degree of shame. My stance is that I would rather attempt to find a path to healing shame by groping in the dark myself than to experiment first with participants. This direct personal engagement was a precondition to the participant study included in this research. I would not knowingly bring others into psychic waters that I did not know how to swim in, as we could both drown. Of course there is no way to fully prevent this but I believe I lessen that risk through heuristic investigation. Initial engagement According to Moustakas (1990) the first stage of inquiry, “initial engagement,” is the discovery of “an intense interest, a passionate concern that calls out to the researcher, one that holds important social meanings and personal, compelling implication” (p.  27). The assumption being that a question already exists within the researcher and will reveal itself with during this stage of the research process. This stage encompasses the autobiographical origins of the topic and describes how this specific area of study was arrived at. For many years, I felt a prodding from within and a constant low-­level anxiety and frustration that I did not know what it was or how to let it out. As one astute patient said to me, “Your hands are empty.” Throughout my doctoral studies, intellectual as they were, the desire to creatively self-­express was a slow, continual burn. I would wriggle in my chair during lectures, daydream, and doodle. In my off time I scribbled out semi-­autobiographical, creative non-­fiction short stories, and dark sophomoric poems, which I would promptly hide away in my journals. When I imagined my journals being discovered and read, I felt shame, self-­ disgust. My art revealed darker, hidden aspects of my personality and my persona tended to live in the light of consciousness, new age wisdom, and even altruism. I imagined my patients feeling confused or unsafe if they saw my creative products. My shadowy expressions spurred internal conflict: I had an undeniable divide between parts of myself—the parts that I deemed desirable and what I assumed people wanted from me versus the parts of myself that I believed were bad, shameful, and undesirable. I could not reconcile these immature and primitive expressions with my elevated self-­ concept. I was one part ashamed of what came out of me and another part

Shame and self-expression   71

intrigued because these creative manifestations possessed a blend of both the alien and the intimate, the objective and the subjective. I did sense that they had something to say and it was my task to move past my fear and judgments if I truly wanted to learn about the creativity of the unconscious. A major source of my opposition to these expressions was that seemed to come from somewhere other than the “I” or conscious ego. I had no internalized framework to conceptualize something other than a unified, almost monolithic self, a self that should have internal and external coherence, a self that was consistent in its actions, feelings, and behaviors, all of which should be in alignment with a higher purpose (e.g., spiritual aspirations such as, perfection, ascent to heaven, enlightenment). Just like my patients, this ideal self was what I constantly compared myself to and punished myself for not being. In my studies of archetypal psychology, I was asked to consider a radically different way of understanding the nature of the self, that it is not a wholly singular being but pluralistic. Seriously considering this gave me the mental space to think of my self as more than a pathologically fragmented person that needed corralling and controlling to conform to the ideal singular self. The figures of the Greco-­Roman Pantheon gave me containers, representations of my diverse psyche that permitted me observe human complexity, which was understood and explicated through their mythology, through a pre-­Christian perspective. My body, my dreams, my art, all became sources of knowing that I had dismissed or even aggressively pushed away. Through the expansion and partial replacement of my previous framework, I began learning to listen to myself through long-­forgotten ways of knowing. I started reclaiming those things in me that I was taught to ignore in the presence of higher authorities (i.e., anyone other than me, e.g., at church, at school, in the family). With de-­construction and death of the old came a long, unanticipated period of fragmentation: dismemberment, confusion, loss, and periods of madness. I unwittingly invoked an initiation and was ignorant of what trials awaited. The one-­sided ideal of perfection that both drove me and punished me was the same unattainable and extremely limiting fantasy my patients agonized from. I needed to learn about my own inner multiplicity. I needed to tolerate exposure and find not only a way to accommodate but also express the many-­sidedness of my soul in order to heal the splits within me before I could help them. As a field, there is a reverence and respect paid to creative products with mysterious origins; the revelation of Jung’s Red Book, released in 2009, confirmed and excited this interest. I continued with my artful explorations and watched the nature and shape of the doodles change into peculiar human and animal or human/animal forms (shown in Figures 5.1 through to 5.3). They typically began as a single eye. The eye would appear as what would be the left eye of the creature, meeting the right eye of the viewer. It was as if the eye held genuine content, it seemed impossible that looking

72   Shame and self-expression

into simple black lines on flat paper that formed the semblance of an eye that could be peered into. The figures with eyes were animate; they appeared to have their own character and purpose. My sense was that they pre-­existed, that they came to my pen and paper with something innately their own. At the same time, the highly pragmatic part of me was dismissive that these simple drawings could be anything more than regressive childhood meanderings. Keeping both possibilities in mind, I allowed the progression of these beings because it was reasonable to assume that their very manifestation communicated a desire to be seen and acknowledged. I did not want to place myself in a position of deciding whether these figures should come into being and for what purpose. Because depth psychology, most notably archetypal psychologist James Hillman, accepts the autonomy of psychic processes and gives credence to the idea that an image may have its own telos; it is our role to be attentive to what wants to emerge (Hillman, 1975). I was encouraged to keep relating to the figures as we were directed to assemble a “dissertation council,” which was to consist of images that correlated to our dissertation subject. At that point, these images had apparently nothing to do with my chosen subject; however, I  assembled the images and provisionally considered them to comprise my  council. These were my first experiences consciously considering the

Figure 5.1  Dissertation Council Curious Cat

Figure 5.2  Dissertation Council Floating Female

74   Shame and self-expression

Figure 5.3  Dissertation Council Primitive Mask

autonomy of images and their potential for greater meaning. Afraid that I may inflate my humble doodles and myself to a grandiose position, I remained apprehensive about connecting them to the objective psyche; in part, because I did not understand what it was or how it could figure into the life of the individual. Nonetheless, this effectively represented the beginning of a dialectical relationship between different aspects of my psyche and tentatively, to the collective unconscious. The evolving questions became, how can creating art allow for unconscious, shadow material to surface and can it contribute to healing inner divides?

Shame and self-expression   75

Immersion Moustakas (1990) writes that during the immersion phase, “The research question is lived in waking, sleeping and even dream states. This requires alertness, concentration and self-­searching. Virtually anything connected with the question becomes raw material for immersion” (p.  28). Having become curious as to their meaning and contemporaneously studying Jung’s active imagination, I began to ask the figures how they wanted to look. For example, I might ask, “How would you like your hair? Would you like me to draw you a body or just a face? Do you want to be pretty?” I followed their guidance and drew them as directed to the extent of my ability. It was clear that the figures were unique and enlivened characters who came to me on their terms. I knew all I could do was create a receptive and responsive environment both internally and externally. I had to relinquish any fantasy that I could control this process or draw these energy-­infused figures at will. I wrote myself this note: “Doodling takes me to my edge, it allows me to interface with my terror of the unknown, of not knowing whether what comes from my pencil will be beautiful or ugly or if I will hate it.” As the source of the images seemed to be other than from my conscious mind, I postulated that they were originating in my personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, or a combination thereof. Certain of the drawings had haunting familiarity; they carried an archaic sentiment. To test my hypothesis that these particular images related to collective forms, I investigated any cultural relics that I intuited as possible antecedents or ancestors. I did find correlating visual aspects between my drawings and a variety of existing historical and contemporary images. However interesting, the connections I found were not powerful enough to compel further research into any specific myth or historical chronicle. The correlating figures I located gave me a sense that my imaginings were rooted in humanity and transmitted inexplicably across time and space, maybe through the objective psyche, maybe through blood and bones (i.e., epigenetics). The drawings were, however, given gravitas through locating ties to existing forms depicted by humans over centuries. Based on how I felt in my body and my affective responses to the drawings, their purpose was not to help me transcend the body and ascend the spirit but to guide me in toward corporeality. During an active imagination exercise in my second year of doctoral coursework, a beautifully sad Victorian woman appeared to me while listening to a poignant, stirring piece of music with eyes closed. She was sitting in a window alone at night, looking down at people walking along a wet, shiny black street below. She was intensely alone and full of yearning. She was a new bride, married to an older man of considerable wealth and social status; nonetheless, he was a man that she did not love. She knew her movements would be limited to what was permissible by her

76   Shame and self-expression

husband and the generally oppressive cultural climate for women. Even if she left her situation, she would have no place to go; her family and the community at large would reject her for leaving her domestic obligations. With no means to earn a living, this was equivalent to death in her time. I had vague, remnant images of a caged bird whose lifelong imprisonment and clipped wings prevented it from flying the coop. Her freedom would be determined by her fate and her adventures confined to her imagination. Months later, another woman made my acquaintance through pen and paper. The second woman was a bit older, dowdier, and she wore spectacles that seemed to indicate she was from a later time period yet still from the corseted era. My impression was that she was unmarried and that she was too stifled to express herself due to familial and cultural expectations. I asked her who the reader of my dissertation would be. And I heard the following; She has never known full self-­expression. Shamed early on, she knew it was safer to hide and deny the parts of her that others deemed unacceptable. She spent her life trying to be light, feeling guilty that she couldn’t be. The sadness and restriction of these figurative women inspired me to pursue my research on shame and self-­expression. To court the women of my imagination, I tracked down and bought the piece of music that was played in class when the first one made her appearance. The piece is uncannily called The Waiting (Hoppe, Tillman, & Wheater, 2001) and consists most notably of heavy cello and violin chords. I listened over and over with eyes closed, allowing the images to come through. I forayed into what life may have been like for a woman in that epoch. I paid special attention to the clothing my drawings wore to try to locate them in time and space; but also to understand the symbolism of the clothes. I spent hours searching through historical fashion books, trying to identify the dresses, spectacles, and hats my figures wore. My investigation covered periods in American history ranging from the 1600s to the mid-­1900s. Not surprisingly, the corset most strikingly represented the restriction of women over hundreds of years. Figure 5.4 represents one of the women I drew during this time. Though mainstream culture has made many advances thanks to the women’s movement, Mormon culture still has not caught up. The Cluff family has deep roots in Mormonism going back to the first Mormon settlers in Utah over two centuries ago. I always felt hemmed in by Mormon morality and tried to rebel against my gender prescription. However, any wrong I committed was met with a backlash of shame and guilt. I would pray and repent desperately over and over but I felt damned. My most powerful shame moments did not come in the presence of others, they

Shame and self-expression   77

Figure 5.4  Active Imagination Corseted Woman

came in the presence of God. I was acutely aware of an omnipresent judge who would view any desire or pleasure I felt apart from “Him” as sinful, including touching of my own body in any non-­mechanical way. The fear of God’s punishment marred my relationship to not only my body but to pleasure in general. Over the years, I realized I could not do what the Bible said no matter what the consequences, so I began to fall away and left Mormonism at age 17. As I thought about these women, I knew they were

78   Shame and self-expression

my ancestors. My genealogy traces back to the British Isles and my family immigrated to the United States in the 1600–1700s. Much closer to the bone were the stories of my grandmothers. My father’s mother felt forced through social pressures of the time and place, Mormon Utah in the late 1930s, to quit touring as a renowned concert violinist to marry, be a homemaker, and have children. There is no place for unmarried women in the Mormon community since the basic unit of life in Mormonism is a heterosexual married couple and their children. According to my father, she deeply resented giving up the life of a violinist and directed her rage at his father and, even more so, at my father and his little brother. She openly blamed his father for impregnating her and blamed her children for trapping her in this tethered domestic lifestyle. To outsiders, my grandfather was the beloved star of the family. He was a gifted musician, conductor, and arranger who took a small, unremarkable high school band to a level of unprecedented excellence. At their combined funeral, generations of grievers came to pay respects to my grandfather; nobody could say enough about his brilliance and passion. When I asked if anyone remembered my grandmother, with hesitation some said yes, that she taught the students violin at the family home. I asked if there was anything special they could tell me about her and the answer was simply this, “She had that pretty red hair.” It is not inconsequential that the stringed instruments in the powerful music that guided my active imagination were the same instruments that my grandparents played, most notably—my grandmother’s violin. My father never played an instrument. At the funeral he listened intently as his parents’ former students shared their cherished memories of their time in my grandfather’s high school band. He appeared to be learning this about his father for the first time. My heart broke for my father as I watched and listened. When I asked him why he never played an instrument, he said, “When I hear music, I just see numbers.” It is almost unbearably painful to imagine my father, left to the numbers in his head, while other children were getting the best of his parents—their passion, love, talent, and time. My father experienced himself as burden and was ashamed of his very being. He was disgusted at himself over any mishap or imperfection. He lived in a constant state of deprivation, never freely experiencing pleasure. He once saved a chocolate bar I gave him for a gift for over 10 years—he was “saving it for a special occasion.” Just as bad as experiencing pleasure, maybe worse, was expressing needs. Needs were for the weak and here we see the evidence for the formation of a narcissistic wound. In my father, I saw the destructive perfectionist that tyrannized his psyche. My mother’s mother lived in Michigan during that same time, the first half of the twentieth century. Her story occurred under somewhat different circumstances but the experience of being a woman in those times was shared. My grandmother gave up her educational aspirations so that her brother could go to college as it was assumed that a boy’s education was

Shame and self-expression   79

more valuable than a girl’s. She dutifully married a man who could provide for her instead. My grandfather was a self-­made businessman who was orphaned at a young age, joined war efforts in his teenage years, then immigrated to Michigan from Canada. My grandmother was 14 years younger than my grandfather. As one would imagine, she had the hopes of romantic love and happy family, fantasies that were not uncommon for young women who had little else to aspire to. However, for unknown reasons, my grandparents were not able to conceive. My mother says that my grandmother adopted her because she was lonely in her marriage. She relied heavily on my mother for her happiness and her identity. In a candid conversation with my mother, she revealed that she felt exploited by her mother. My mother was a stunning beauty and was lauded as such in my grandmother’s social circles. She demanded perfect physical presentation and polite behavior from my mother. From an object-­relations perspective, one might say she viewed my mother as a self-­object. I believe my mother’s vulnerability to my grandmother’s narcissistic needs was exacerbated because she was adopted and needed to prove her value. Though, if you were to ask her, my mother would not agree that her adoption had profound psychological impacts. From my perspective, my mother did not feel she had an inalienable right to be. While pregnant, my grandmother demanded that my mother give birth to me on her birthday, even though her birthday was almost two weeks past my due date. I was delivered by emergency cesarean section squarely on my grandmother’s birthday. Surely, this was not consciously planned by my mother but as a depth psychologist, I would not rule out the power of suggestion and projection, especially considering the porous emotional boundaries between my mother and my grandmother. My mother learned to be an object whose primary purpose was to fulfill the needs of others and eventually she became an object to herself. There was little value placed on my mother as a subjective being. My grandmother died prematurely from alcoholism. I was a school-­aged child; I never saw my mother grieve for her. What my grandmothers had in common is that they both felt they were not able to live the lives they wanted; neither was able to pursue their passion. In order to meet the social expectations of women they were wives and mothers who sacrificed their ambitions so that the men in their lives could succeed. I never really knew either sets of grandparents so I am left to flesh out what little my parents shared about them. It is not possible to know what the objective truth is but I do know that the stories they told were the truth through my parents’ eyes. The most definitive evidence of their childhood wounds can be observed in their speech, posture, affects, behaviors, choices, and other unconscious displays. This discussion is an attempt to re-­construct the shame sources of my parents, not to ascribe blame. Based on the socio-­historical context of my grandmothers’ lives, it is clear that Judeo-­Christian culture played a role in determining their

80   Shame and self-expression

stories of un-­fulfillment and the transmission of their pain and anger onto my parents. I believe their unconsciousness or lack of communication with the split off parts of themselves resulted in harmful projections onto my parents in unique ways but both yielding some similar results: shame for being subjective entities with their own needs and desires and their compulsive strivings for perfection in an effort to gain love and approval. It could be that an unconscious fantasy of becoming perfectly mirroring objects would win the love of their mothers. Conversely, this only seemed to reinforce feelings of defeat, self-­hatred, and shame. Dionysus and the art of burlesque During my immersion process the archetypal Dionysus occurred to me as a representation of what was repressed in me, my family of origin, and distorted in American culture. Before I arrived at the current research question, I was approved to pursue a different avenue of inquiry. The original concept was to conduct an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) comprised of interviewing six burlesque dancers (i.e., the research participants) about their experience in creating their burlesque characters and whether they felt these characters allowed them to express otherwise repressed aspects of their personalities. Specifically, the question was, “How can the conscious creation of an alter ego allow for expression of the shadow?” Burlesque dancers were chosen because they create and perform stage persona, which they typically have creative control in developing. Additionally, burlesque dancers have historically expressed what is repressed in mainstream culture. From an archetypal perspective, particularly those shadow elements represented by the Greek god Dionysus including his association with women, transgression, sexuality, wildness, theater, the mask, multiplicity, paradox, and identity. Of course, these were the same qualities stifled, distorted, underdeveloped, or unconscious in me. However, I had no background in mythology or burlesque; nothing more than a strong curiosity or an unconscious drive to actuate substantiated my course. Being a non-­intellectual at base but somewhat of a purist, I could not be satisfied by hermeneutics so I submersed myself in whatever I felt was Dionysian, especially the unfamiliar subculture of burlesque. My own internal set of ethics would not allow me to lay claim to knowing anything of these subjects without participation. I spent time attending burlesques performances, taking classes, locating what little recorded media was available, and developing my own burlesque stage persona. A corset, a wig, fishnet stockings, and a hat were key to the costumes of my dark feminine character. Jungian Jean Bolen (1989/2014) writes: To invite Dionysus to be present may require getting out of one’s usual environment, out of one’s usual clothes, out of one’s habitual persona

Shame and self-expression   81

or roles.… Anything that loosens the hold of the mind and the grip of time helps bring Dionysus closer. When we leave our usual conscious awareness of time or miles to go and lose ourselves in the experience, we are transported to another subjectively felt ecstatic realm. (p. 262) Sobel (1956) traces the origins of burlesque to the Greek classics and concludes that burlesque’s history is tied to our culture’s ever-­changing morals. Bolen (1989/2014) aptly writes: Dionysus is the most significant figure at a time of transition. He may enter a woman’s life and call her away from hearth and home to revel, and in so doing, he may break up her home and marriage, and activate the passion and the anger that she has repressed all her life, first as the good girl and then as the good wife. (p. 275) Evans (1988) writes that this subdual relates to the rites of Dionysus, as Dionysian rites emphasized organic feeling states and the physical body, which were typically seen as feminine, “lower” class, or closer to the earth: conversely, puritanical morality and reason were typically affiliated with masculine establishment and the “higher” aspects of humanity (p.  52). Evans also states that revivification of the Dionysian has been observed following oppressive, patriarchal values such as the classical period of Greek civilization (p. 42). Dionysus is considered the favorite god of women and wine and ecstasy, the liberator; he is the “mad god,” known for driving women from their domestic duties into raving madness. These qualities are in direct opposition to the rules of lady-­like behavior. There is no surprise that the corset stayed with me as a symbol of restriction since that is its literal function: to restrict certain section of a woman’s torso to create the desired shape au currant. Archetypal psychology would proclaim that the gods must be bidden through reverie or symbol; as such I took on this concept and attempted to summon muses for my research. I collected items that represented the matter I was concerned with: the relationship between Dionysus and self-­expression. I sat with corsets and the wigs and the urge to glean some new understanding about shame and the repression of the feminine. I plastered my walls with images of repressed women in their Victorian garb. I stacked my shelves with any book I could locate about fashion and politics and burlesque from that era. I noted substantial overlap between the social standing of women, the Victorian esthetic, and burlesque costuming. A sampling of hats and wigs I collected during this time are depicted in Figures 5.5 and 5.6. Wearing these period-­inspired garments served to transition me from an intellectually dominated research process to one that was more embodied.

Figure 5.5  Active Imagination Hats

Shame and self-expression   83

Figure 5.6  Wigs for Dionysus

As previously written, while collecting data for this research, I went to several burlesque shows and took classes that focused on the history of burlesque, the influence of changing societal values and the economy on burlesque, and the development of a burlesque character. Burlesque evoked conflicting feelings in me because of its absurd exploitation of women, which appeared as a sexist, passé form of men’s entertainment, it is striptease no matter how it is packaged. Striptease—women stripping for money under the objectifying gaze—is denigrating. Until very recently, strippers were generally assumed to be damaged women with few other resources; vulnerable to being taken advantage of due to lack of familial support, moral virtues, education, intelligence and most obviously, money. As it carries so much of our cultural shadow, burlesque is an art form that appears to paradoxically glamorize the objectification of women while creating a “woman-­owned space” that has the potential to liberate women from the very objectification under which we suffer. Putting burlesque, a low-­brow, working class, poor-­man’s substitute for real culture, center stage in scholarly research felt like unnatural inflation. With the most modern resurgence neo-­burlesque (1990s to present), women are more in  control of their stage personas and performance than in the past. In

84   Shame and self-expression

watching hours of interviews of various dancers through the decades, it was evident that the women of burlesque predominantly felt that their time on the stage was a positive contribution to their lives. Timmons (2008) documented 10 women (non-­performers) that enrolled in a class to learn the art of the burlesque, filming the women throughout their processes in class as well as in their personal lives up through the final performance/ class graduation. The film captures the women in active creation of a burlesque persona and then the performance of that persona on stage. Interviews of the women post-­performance reveal the impact it had on their sense of self; the feedback from the women was overwhelming positive as there were liberating and empowering elements to conveying their burlesque selves publicly. It is still unclear as to the exact dynamics that make this seemingly irresolvable conflict work. Dionysus the archetype is charged with “stirring up the most ethereal and basest of feelings, creating conflicts within the psyche and with the society” (Bolen, 1989/2014, p. 255). What is well documented are themes such as multiplicity, madness, intoxication, ecstasy, death/rebirth, transformation, mutable identity; his associations with theater, wine, women, the body, sexuality; and embodying attributes that are antithetical to Judeo-­Christian tenets. When I attempted to write about my findings, I could not metabolize what I experienced enough so as to articulate them in a way that would be meaningful to a research study. From an archetypal perspective, it could be said that I was identifying with the archetype or possessed by the archetypal energy of the wild Dionysus. I invited it, courted it overtly, and allowed it to take hold of my psyche in some way. Bolen (1989/2014) writes, “Only a man with a strong and healthy ego can appropriately restrain the archetype’s influence and choose how, when, with whom, and under what circumstances the Dionysus in him is lived out” (p. 270). The very nature of this Greek god presented me with the incommensurable problem of defining Dionysus. Scholars of the classics, mythology, philosophy, and psychology have fallen short of forming a unified opinion of who this God is, his myth, his symbolism, the experience of him and what he means to contemporary culture. Kerenyi attributes modern interest in Dionysus largely to Nietzsche’s obsession with the god, namely the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche states that we still don’t know what is Dionysian (Kerenyi, 1976, Preface xxiv). From the very start, one must grapple with profound ambiguity and the unrelenting tension of attempting to know the unknowable. Notwithstanding, the figure holds undeniable fascination and his complexity does not prevent those who have been touched by the Dionysian to pursue further articulation of what he is. After approximately one year of studying the art of burlesque and the archetypal Dionysus, I packed away my wigs and corsets in hopes that I might find a way to bridge the gap between intellect and embodiment, between the upper world and the underworld, to

Shame and self-expression   85

communicate what I learned through participation in the mystery into comprehensible, written language. As is common in depth psychological research, the investigation into burlesque was an entrée into unconscious material but did hold enough psychic energy to take root as the topic for the dissertation. In retrospect, the choice to interview others rather than use the self as the subject of study was an attempt to distance me from the shadow for fear of personal exposure. Furthermore, focusing on the performance of a persona kept me afloat of the shame that lay beneath. When it was clear that shame could and should not be avoided, it slowly became a focus of the research and my personal shame needed to be found, felt, and related to. Incubation Moustakas (1990) writes that incubation “involves a retreat from the intense, concentrated focus, allowing the expansion of knowledge to take place at a more subtle level, enabling the inner tacit dimension and intuition to clarify and extend understanding” (p. 28). My research completely halted, at least consciously, for over one year when a sequence of events happened: I totaled my car in an accident, my grandmother died, and shortly thereafter, my father’s cancer worsened. My father expressed that he wanted to bury the ashes of both his deceased parents at their family gravesite in Provo, Utah. At this time I was living in Los Angeles and my father was in Oregon. Though I had been given permission by everybody whose opinion I respected: my therapist, my mother, my siblings, and my friends not to take the 871-mile road trip with my father, I followed my own sense that it was the “right” thing to do no matter what unmet childhood needs for love and approval were driving me. The morning I was meant to fly out I missed my airport shuttle by no more than two minutes. I panicked then sat on my living room floor wondering if that was a sign that I should not go. So much of me did not want to go anyway, I feared that I should heed everyone’s advice and not put myself through this. My father was abusive physically and mentally to us but to my mother and my brother worst of all. I had been terrified of him for most of my life. I would stay home if I were a sane person. I cried and paced and panicked again before I called a cab to drive me to the airport. The flight was thankfully too short for me to ruminate and when I walked out onto the tarmac with my carryon, I saw a slumped-­over silhouette who resembled a combination of Gollum and the grim reaper. I was all but shocked; I headed his way, realizing that this could very well be my father and also realizing that he was not sure whether I was his daughter. My father and I had not seen each other in over a decade. I had offered to visit him many times and he always turned me down. I finally asked him, when I was about age 35, to explain to me why he refused to see me. He admitted that he wanted to

86   Shame and self-expression

remember me as his young, pretty, perfect little girl. Hearing this was equivalent to being simultaneously punched in the stomach and hit over the head with a blunt object while my heart was twisting through my chest. I suspected he may be ashamed of his condition or guilty about his parental failings but I never thought it was because he did not want me, a grown up adult woman with wrinkles and sun damage to destroy his fantasy of perfection. I hung up the phone and started sobbing from an old buried place inside. Memories came flooding back—the time he raged at me for not wearing sunscreen and ruining my nose, the time I fell and split my lip open, ruining my pretty smile; the time he beat my brother because he suspected he had done something to hurt my angelic face. It was clear that I was an object and not a full human with any subjective experience that he was interested in. There were two options in my father’s eyes: you are perfect or you are ruined. To be ruined is to be irredeemable: destroyed, devastated, and irrevocably damaged. I had struggled in my 20s with something akin to body dysmorphic disorder with special attention to my face and even more to the point, the skin. This obsession came alive most prominently when I was in love relationships. I remember being in bed, wide awake visually scanning my face with my mind’s eye, obsessing desperately over each and every imperfection, each misplaced freckle, premature wrinkle, improper proportion; it was endless. It sent me into utter hopelessness that I could never perfect all these flaws no matter what I did. I believed that my then fiancé had never truly seen my face, I convinced myself that all my clever hiding behind glasses, make up, hats, and good lighting had prevented him from seeing the real me. The real me was disgusting and unlovable: profoundly ruined. It would be impossible for him to be with me if I stood before him completely unadorned with fluorescent overhead lighting illuminating every nasty flaw I had. My body, my face, my hair, my skin were all a source of shame. I already knew I was damaged and dirty inside but that could be tucked away or transcended. That part of me never had to be revealed to my partner but my face was something I could not entirely hide. My father survived for only three months after we put his parents in the ground. In those months leading up to and several months following my father’s death, my life resembled brambles of entangled, entwined, unending switches to nowhere. Nothing was comfortable, nothing was clear; nothing made sense, the meaning and purpose of my life was draining away from my heart into a vortex of meaninglessness. I could not find the why in anything I was doing. I was awkward in my space, in my body, and in my mind. Things I had thought meant something to me, like maintaining friendships, building a business, having a relationship, and doing this research project, were losing their value, so I packed away everything I owned except for what clothes I could fit in my car. I wanted to be free of ties. I had steadily pursued my doctorate for the past three years and

Shame and self-expression   87

wanted to get far away from psychology, academia, and anything else that reminded me that of the future I was trying to build but no longer sure I wanted. Fueling this was fear for my own mortality. I had undiagnosed lumps in my breast that I refused to get checked. I felt that if it was cancer, I did not want to know. A dark entity attached itself to me and I did not have the strength to fend it off. I felt my own death was impending so I took to traveling. I allowed myself the possibility of not completing this research and not living in my home country. I needed to give myself that permission. Just as importantly, I needed to experience myself a mainstream human. When I moved through the world after graduate school, I felt alien, remote, unlikeable, and just plain weird. I had lost my connection to everyday people, meaning non-­psychologists, and everyday life. I feared that I would never be part of the larger community of people, historically, I never had been but I had worked hard to feel a sense of belonging to the general population. While on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean listening to a group of Europeans talking about the details of their hometowns and the lives they led, I found some humanity. They were not telling particularly engaging stories, they were not revealing psychically charged material; they were just talking about mundane life. I noticed that I was listening as part of the group; I was not disinterested by the lack of intellectual content or potent emotional connection. I was happy to fit in and feel natural about it. I felt like a triumph to be “normal.” Somewhat ironically, bouncing around the Western hemisphere gave me the grounding and reconnection with people that I was missing. In terms of this study, it taught me that I could write a dissertation that might not only be applicable but also accessible to anyone who has a compromised relationship with the self and the artist within due to shame. This connection to the larger social body gave me a sense that my work had the potential to be meaningful to others. I needed this relatedness because, in this time of disorientation, it became painfully apparent that gaining my father’s approval was a driving force in pursuing higher education. The idea of doing this work for myself alone did not give me ample energy to continue. After one year and one month of vagabonding I was clear that I wanted to come back and finish this project. Illumination and explication These phases involve “opening a door to new awareness, a modification of an old understanding, a synthesis of fragmented knowledge, or new discovery” (Moustakas, 1990, p. 29). Days before I received the news that my father passed I committed to drive a friend up to an artist’s studio for a show they were collaborating on. Though I was in a state of dissociative shock, I did not know what else to do but keep my promise to make the 90-mile trip to Santa Barbara. The studio belonged to an assemblage artist.

88   Shame and self-expression

Even in my state, some part of me was bewitched by her artwork—assemblage pieces comprised of Victorian era gloves, centuries old photographs, well-­worn Cuban cigar boxes, rusted hardware, all telling visual stories and provoking emotions in me. When the artist noticed my intrigue, she invited me to attend one of her workshops. Five or six months later I took her up on the offer. Over the course of the three-­day workshop, I had opportunities to meet my shame in new, unexpected ways. It is important to note this was not an art therapy workshop and was not intended to be therapeutic. The artist had no background in psychology and did nothing to provide a safe emotional holding environment. Her only intention was to provide loose instruction to a small group of interested people in her home studio and to encourage us to complete a piece by the end of the workshop. We were to bring all tools and objects to work with. I had no tools or objects of special significance, no project I wanted to work on; I was still living in and out of my car and a short-­term rental casita. The night before the class started I went to two or three thrift stores grabbing anything that had visual interest. I showed up feeling inadequate and ill prepared. I sat with my objects staring while the anxiety of not knowing what to do grew. I started trying to make sense of what was in front of me, seeing what, if anything, made sense or fit together; at this point I had no idea how to physically connect the objects together or what was possible. When I did suspect something could work, I hesitated. I did not want to alter anything for fear of ruining it. I kept freezing up, unable to commit to making the first cut, so to speak. I felt my face getting hot, I felt panicky, I regretted being at the workshop, I was flooded and the longer I sat there immobilized, the more intense these feelings got. I decided to walk away from it for a moment and bumped into the artist in the kitchen cutting tomatoes. She asked, “You know the best way to eat a tomato, right?” I replied, “You just pick them sun-­ripened off the vine.” She looked me in the eye and said “No.” She then gave me a detailed description of how to properly prepare a tomato to exact the best flavor. It was clearly a metaphor for de-­constructing the objects that she must have sensed I was afraid to ruin. Once I broke the barrier of original wholeness and perfection, the process began to flow, though there were fits and starts throughout. On the second day I noticed myself not wanting the artist’s input and I especially did not want her tampering with my emerging piece. On the third day, I was looking at something that was nothing. It was a meaningless, crude collection of junk. I did not feel finished or like a piece of art but she wanted us to be done. She walked by my piece, dropped a broken necklace over a naked wire and said, “There. It’s done!” I was bothered that she took that liberty but I reminded myself that I was a student and, anyway, what use was there in being possessive of the artwork? I did not even really like the piece until the artist told me it was very good. Her approval allowed me to feel proud of my artwork. After the workshop, I called a

Shame and self-expression   89

friend that had been there for me through my dad’s passing. He was excited to point out that I sounded happy. He said he had not heard me sound that animated in some time. His observation made me reflect on how I felt. I did feel good. In the following days I stared at what I had made, liking it more and more, and I continued to play with the leftover objects. I was filled with something I could not describe—perhaps being full was all it was. I found a way to quell the nagging feeling of un-­ fulfillment and not knowing what to do with my hands. The assemblage process keeps me embodied, connected to both myself and the phenomenal world, displacing self-­focus and, therefore, shame. When working on a piece, I am living in a certain field, my life has an other-­than-usual charge, which attracts objects to me or impels me to notice objects that relate to my project. I am constantly scanning for anything that resembles the piece, sometimes even actively searching for an as yet unknown object that I may complete the piece. An intimacy develops when considering what a piece wants to say and what the object wants to be and how it might be transformed from forgotten debris to the star feature in a work of art. Though I am not usually aware of it at the time, when looking at the finished pieces I can see that by virtue of their uniqueness that they are conveying something of me. Living with these corporeal psychic products giving me the opportunity to see what was otherwise an immaterial, uncongealed image in my unconscious. In addition to having their subjective meanings, I can make meanings for myself. I can observe my projections onto the objects and learn something about how I view the world and how they serve as containers for my inner contents. Creative synthesis Thoroughly familiar with the data, and following a preparatory phase of solitude and meditation, the researcher puts the components and core themes usually into the form of creative synthesis expressed as a  narrative account, a report, a thesis, a poem, story, drawing, painting, etc. (Moustakas, 1990, p. 31) The assemblage artwork created during this phase comprises the creative synthesis of this self-­study on shame and art making. In a certain respect, the pieces are self-­representational and in another respect, they convey the psychic space I occupied: this dialectical relationship is described conceptually in the literature review of this research and is explicated through the following depictions of the assemblage art pieces.

90   Shame and self-expression

The Dummy and the Dancer This piece began with an intact musical jewelry box that a friend showed me in a thrift shop (Refer to Figure 5.7, “The Dummy and the Dancer”). My reaction to it was tentative; eight dollars seemed like more than I wanted to spend on something I did not love at first sight and had no plans for but I bought it anyway. I left it sitting on my studio table for weeks, uninspired and busy with more immediate interests. Eventually, I picked it up and starting tinkering with it. I examined it to see how it was built. When I realized I could unscrew a piece or two without damaging it and still be able to restore it to its original state, I grabbed my screwdriver. As I was dismantling the box, I became aware of my thoughts and feelings about doing so. I also began to dialogue with the box: more specifically, the frozen dancer on a skewer. Here’s a transcript of that imaginal dialogue: Me to Me:   I

feel like I’m desecrating something, as if I’m committing a sin. It’s wrong to be doing this, breaking apart the whole and complete box, taking away its purity and magic … I know why I feel this way! I was told not to mess with things, not to break things, not to undo what has been done, to keep things as perfect as possible—as if they’d never been touched. That’s got to be my Dad’s voice in my head.

Figure 5.7  The Dummy and the Dancer

Shame and self-expression   91

Figure 5.8  Reassembled Music Box

Wow, so Mormon! I definitely have to do this, cross this barrier, risk irrecoverably wrecking this relic of perfection. I will be very careful though. Me to Dancer:   It took me a while to deconstruct your music box. It felt too precious. To alter it from its original, pure state would have felt like an unredeemable wrong. I was always afraid to ruin what I touched. But once I realized that I could put your box back together, I got excited. When I took you off of your post, it felt like I freed and displaced you at once. I hoped that would set you free, let you relax, get out of the tense, ready-­to-perform at anyone’s whim mode of being. Then I worried that you would no longer feel you had a purpose. How did you feel? Dancer to Me:   You propped me against my mirror, the first time my body has touched another surface, and the first time I have ever rested. I was relieved at first but—you’re right—without a purpose, no function to perform, immediately I began to feel lost. I also began to remember. Me to Dancer:   What did you feel and remember? Dancer to Me:   The Japanese workingmen that made me in the factory, their laughing and cajoling at the ridiculousness of me … my life in a

92   Shame and self-expression

box—mostly alone, mostly in darkness. The sound of the music box was my only love but after a few turns, not many bothered to wind up the box to listen to his song to me. To watch me spin was novel at first, then a bore, then an annoyance. I longed to hear my song, the music box and I had only each other to count on, we were essentially one, until now. I look at him, my music box, and he is not the man I imagined; he’s a beautiful instrument with the soul of a human, kinda like me I guess. We are both bound to those who decide to wind us up. Me to Dancer:   Do you want me to put it all back together? I feel sad when I look at you. I feel you as an orphan; a being that is very alone—out of context, without a job or family or place you belong. Dancer to Me:   I am not sure I know what sad is but when you hung a picture of that woman over my stage, I felt she was my family, my mother. I ached for something, I felt abandoned but held. Me to Dancer:   I was waiting to find the right spot for her. When I saw you two together in the stage mirror, I felt you belonged to each other. Dancer to Me:   I sense that I know that man you placed in the mirror next to me. When you put him there for good, I felt more secure, less alone. Me to Dancer:   He is an orphan too. Sculpted to be a blank slate with no face, nothing to distinguish him from any other wooden doll, a bit like you—a factory made mass reproduction. I displayed this piece in an art show I challenged myself to host. I had no intention of selling anything, likely because I devalued my work but also because I had no experience as an artist, curator, or otherwise. Unexpectedly, a woman that attended the show connected with the music box piece. Her sister noted this and came in a few days later to secretly buy it for her as a birthday gift. I sold it because I felt this woman loved it and appreciated it more than I did. I was also flattered that someone related to the work and wanted to possess it. Since it sold I have missed that piece. I realized later that it was because it was the first piece that told me a story. I also miss it because I undervalued it while I did have it. I would wind her up and play her song when I was doing this research with the intention of inviting multiple levels of consciousness to communicate—the subjective and objective, the personal and the collective.

Master or servant? I had no plan and there was no particular thought process or methodology I used when I selected the objects from my mother’s husband’s closed-­ down antiques store. I chose what was visually attractive, esthetically pleasing. Some things I chose because I could imagine using them to make or include in a piece somehow. I was attracted to rusted old mining gear, oxidized tools, and various hardware pieces. I also found two wooden

Shame and self-expression   93

toolboxes from the 1940s roughly. The violin case was the last thing I noticed and I was on the fence about taking it with me. I assumed it had monetary value and was worried there may be repercussions because my mother’s husband wasn’t there to approve of me taking it back to California from Arizona. I was relieved to find out later that it had no special meaning or exceptional value. I do not know why I was not conscious of the connection between the violin case and my Grandmother Cluff until I started working with it. That awareness exalted the violin and, at the same time, it became a target for my anger. As with the music box, I carefully deconstructed the case but I was dialoguing with my dead grandmother the entire time. I was almost mocking her and sneering at her while I defiled what would likely have been a sacred object to her. I felt anger toward my grandmother because of all the stories my father told and that my mother usually corroborated. I was resentful that, in my father’s experience, she loved her violin more than she did my father. Though this one-­way conversation was happening, I was also dialoguing with the piece. The objects I used and the overall design of the piece did not literally relate to what I imagined about the relationship between my grandmother, the violin, and my father. What viewers generally take away from this piece is its apparent sexuality (see Figure 5.9, Master or Servant). There is a sadomasochistic connotation to the piece and in that sense I can see how it relates to my father. It could be said that his psyche was sadomasochistic. He mainly spoke of the past and in his stories he was the victim or the hero—or a hero that was victimized. However, in his view, he was never the hero in his mother’s eyes. My father had a complex relationship with his sexuality and femininity, which I will not detail in this study but this relationship is conveyed in the piece. Validation Validation is a question of meaning: “Does the synthesis present comprehensively, vividly, and accurately the meanings and essences of the experience?” (Moustakas, 1990, p.  37). This is ascertained through collecting feedback and participant validation. Regarding participant validation, a study was designed and conducted, which comprises the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) included in this research. During the conceptualization and planning stage of the participant study, I collected feedback from several, diverse sources. I expected my subject, looking at the relationship between shame and art making, to be largely relatable to since blocks to creating artwork, negative judgments about one’s creative attempts, and stories of critical art teachers in grade school, are so often reported amongst adults. However, after many weeks of sharing my topic with colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, it became clear that the use of the word “shame” in my research was alienating. Many said that it

Figure 5.9  Master or Servant?

Shame and self-expression   95

sounded “heavy” and wished me luck, as if to say, this is a difficult prospect at best. I noticed a reaction pattern when I said that shame was core to my research: a subtle recoiling in bodily gesture, an instant break in eye contact, and withdrawal of curiosity. It felt as though people did not relate to shame or did not want to align themselves with it by joining with me. Initially, I wanted to keep that term in the forefront because pervasive secondary shame in the culture keeps it hidden and, therefore, difficult to access and heal. However, that phenomenon appeared to preclude people from recognizing their own shame. In other words, very few people I spoke with admitted to feeling shame or were unaware of any shame that might be operating. That is not to say that everyone has problematic shame; however, the evidence for the presence shame is observable through physical and psychological expressions. Despite these signals and symptoms, most would rather attribute the manifestations of shame (e.g., perfectionism) to a more ego-­based, conscious cause or name any other self-­conscious emotion besides shame to explain the indicators. For example, a person states that their perfectionistic tendencies are due to high parental expectations for their scholastic performance. This is a reasonable association. Notwithstanding, the person is still acting as if there is an ever-­present parent evaluating them long after they have left the home. The person no longer needs the original stimuli to criticize them; they now have an “inner critic.” Most readily admit to being perfectionistic. In fact, it may be the one acceptable flaw to admit to, for instance in a job interview. Problematic shame does not always result in perfectionism and perfectionism in a personality is not proof-­positive that shame is the cause. Nevertheless, I posit that it may be possible to back into shame through perfectionism. As perfectionism is the more acceptable and accessible experience, I considered revising my research to soften any edges that shame may present and wondered whether it may be prudent to address perfectionism before shame is introduced as a potential cause. Another possibility I considered was to make apparent the shame-­perfectionism link at the outset of the participant-­finding process. However, though affiliated with shame, perfectionism has a phenomenology unto itself and its roots are multifarious. To maintain the integrity of the objective of this research, I decided to keep shame out in front of in the participant study. My observations in conjunction with participants’ reports are summarized in Chapter 6.

Chapter 6

Interpretive phenomenological analysis

The purpose of this Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is to supplement the heuristic study with participant-­based research to further apprehend the relationships between shame, creative self-­expression, and assemblage art. The workshop design is grounded in my subjective experience as described in the heuristic portion of this study. This is not a clinical study and the methods are not designed as psychotherapeutic treatment. Nevertheless, the experiments in this study resemble some of the practices of art therapy. The interest of this study is in how participants negotiate the relationship between shame and artistic expression in an assemblage art workshop guided by me as a researcher-­participant. Research data consists of pre- and post-­workshop questionnaires designed to determine the participants’ prior shame experiences related to art making as well as my observations during and reflections after the workshop. The purpose of the pre-­workshop questionnaire was to establish baseline conditions, to stir the memories and imaginations of the participants, and prepare them for the types of information sought for in the study. These pre-­written questions were also posed to identify any patterns and correlations between respondents. The post-­workshop questionnaire was intended to record any changes in their relationships to shame and art making. The participants also had an opportunity to add any information or reflections not explicitly asked for on the post-­workshop questionnaire.

Summary of the participant study The population consisted of eight participants: five females and three males between the ages of 21 to 56. One participant was Russian, one was Mexican, and one was English, the rest were American. The research data was collected via pre- and post-­workshop questionnaires designed to ascertain the participants shame experiences related to art making. All of the members had some experience in art making such as writing, photography, painting, and a related art form—collage. Except for the researcher-­ participant, only one of the participants had specific assemblage art making

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   97

experience. The participants ran a gamut of exposure in sharing their creative works and varying levels of understanding and awareness of shame. Most participants had shared their artwork at some level in the past and received both negative and positive feedback. All agreed without reservation that they would be willing to make art in the group setting. Two participants reported no history of significant shame with respect to creating and sharing their artwork. Interestingly, one participant stated that he did feel shame but it was not due to sharing his art because he did not feel that it was his true passion; the source of his shame was that he had not found a way to genuinely express himself creatively. Others revealed a complex relationship to shame in that, within a single questionnaire, some answers consciously denied the presence of shame and other answers alluded to strong shame influences. For example, some participants answered that they had no self-­conscious feelings about sharing artwork at the top of the pre-­workshop questionnaire; however, in response to a later question asking the participants to imagine whether reduction of shame would affect their artistic expression, even those who reported an absence of shame could envision and describe how they would express themselves more freely and frequently without it. All participants expressed that the title of “artist” is applicable to anyone who makes art. One participant has a sibling that the family considers to be the “real artist” because he studied art formally in college. Without formal training, this participant did not feel entitled to be called an artist despite actively making art for the past few years. Further, because the material used to create the pieces was “detritus from the streets,” it could not be considered “real art.” As discussed in the literature review, a common distinction made between what is art and what is not art is that real art is envisioned as classical, fine art as opposed to folk art (often thought of as craftwork versus artwork) or unconventional arts such as outsider art, naïve, and many other art forms created by self-­taught artists. A hierarchical relationship between the high arts and all other creative forms remains an active image in the collective Western psyche; though newer images of what art is are continuously being formed.

Intent As a researcher, I anticipated that the pre-­workshop questionnaire would ignite a process in the conscious as well as the unconscious; that issues of shame that may be lurking would come to the fore. The experiment was designed to indirectly address shame during the workshop, as its aim was to minimize the potential for unnecessary re-­shaming. There was a brief discussion at the outset to remind the group as to the purpose of the workshop, to cover basic housekeeping (e.g., the locations of the bathrooms, sink, etc.), and answer any questions from the participants. In response to

98   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

a participant question, clarification was made as to the distinction between shame and guilt. I explained that the workshop was meant to serve as an experiential metaphor for assembling disparate parts of the self, expressing the shamed parts of the self, to contact the psyche, and to confront the unknown in a contained setting. My impression was that this explanation was received with a mix of reactions ranging from disinterest to fearful excitement at the prospect of working with shame through the making of art. It has been established that shame occurs not only on a cognitive level but also on a body level. Thus, one implicit intention of the workshop was embodiment, to increase both proprioception and interoception. Since shame has a distinct, powerful psychobiological component, the researcher­participant led the group in a breathing exercise and well as a brief body scan to notice the state of the body and to welcome bodily sensations during the process. More specifically, the body scan’s purpose was to locate shame in the body, or as an image (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.) and to heighten awareness of the participants’ physical experiences during the workshop. The aim to increase sensitivity to both interoception and proprioception during the experiment was to facilitate links between cognitive activity and physical sensations. The expectation was that these links would alert the person to their total experience and encourage a state of embodied presence, even during a shame-­invoking activity, that can develop into a self-­assessment and awareness system. There is great value in learning to consciously connect to the body as susceptibility to various negative health outcomes can occur due to forms of dissociation (e.g., splitting, un-­embodiment), which are frequent impacts of shame. The participants appeared to move between states of seriousness and anxiety, to playful experimentation, to meditative reveries, to purposefully composing, to actual construction, to reflection on the pieces in progress. I observed as both a researcher and a participant that making assemblage art demands that we engage the body and mind in problem solving—solving the problems of where to start, what to create, and how to bring about the desired results. Also noted was increased alertness due to the novelty of the space, the uncertainly of the activity, working with the objects, and using tools that could pose danger (e.g., drills, saws, hammers, heat guns, noxious adhesives) without prior training. During the workshop, the activity of assembling art seemed to compel such a degree of concentration that the body seemed all but forgotten except for the discomfort associated with the heat on the studio. The heat became a source of distraction and aggravation as the mornings progressed into afternoons, which enhanced feeling of frustration participants were already experiencing because of mistakes made, disliking their creations, and failed attempts to emulate what they envisioned. In the second half of the day when heat and fatigue rose, interest, excitement, and the ability to think and create diminished.

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   99

It is possible that dis-­engagement with the body’s ongoing wants and needs for comfort, hydration, satiation, and elimination that took place during the workshop was initially adaptive and requisite to working on the task of creating assemblage art. As a researcher and participant, I posit that delaying the gratification of the body to a reasonable degree, not in a protracted or self-­punishing manner, a degree far below the level of unhealthy masochism, may serve to honor the creative inspiration available in a particular moment. As described previously, however, this self-­denial found its limits. How embodiment is defined or experienced and whether there are positive/good or negative/bad types of embodiment or disembodiment was not studied and remains undetermined in this research. Secondary shame has the capacity to block an individual from recognizing her or his shame. As stated previously, sometimes shame is only identifiable by the traces it leaves. Despite the low occurrence or obfuscation of shame in the questionnaires, during the workshop, the researcher observed that harsh negative evaluation of one’s work was frequently verbalized. Perfectionism, fear of making a mistake, or irrevocably ruining something is often linked to shame at the core. A simple but powerful example of this happened early in the workshop. One participant asked for paper to use in her piece so the researcher-­participant handed her a hardcover art history textbook. She stopped and shuddered saying she could not possibly ruin the book by using its pages. The researcher-­participant reassured her that the current purpose of that book was to be used for assemblage art. The researcher-­participant encouraged her to look through the book for images and tear out the pages she wanted to use. She looked considerately at its pages until she found some images that resonated with her. When she was finally able to tear out a page, she expressed that she felt free and continued to play and use the book for inspiration. One way to view this is that she discovered that she did not ruin anything by using the books pages. She did not commit a wrong against the book or me: there were no negative repercussions. She gave the matter a new life. The researcher observed that approximately one hour into the workshop participants went from playing with objects and getting ideas to being stuck or lost; attachment to doing things “right” and anxiety about not knowing how to implement their visions presented in the room. I looked at their work areas and saw the disconnected parts laid out. In an unplanned, unmethodical way, I asked each person where he or she saw their piece going and what was keeping them from creating it. The issues related to not knowing how to bring the pieces together, not knowing how or what to build off of. I offered up materials that could serve as a “base” to each student according to the direction they wanted to take their project. If shame was activated in the participants, then it is possible that early ruptures in attachment were also activated. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970) developed the concept of the

100   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

“secure base,” which represents the mental state of the caregiver and serves as the foundation that allows a child to feel confident enough in their caregiver to explore beyond the immediacy of the caregiver–child relationship—most observably the child’s sense of security when the caregiver leaves the room or the child moves beyond the intimate proximity of the caregiver (e.g., slightly out of a direct line of sight). Drawing this parallel is not intended to infantilize the participants’ but to speculate as to the nature of distress in confronting the “strange situation” that the workshop presented. For one student, a wooden two by four from a housing demolition provided the base. For another student, a garden fixture meant for training plant vines worked. A third student used a wire basket-­like candleholder. Once the bases were identified, the level of anxiety in the room dropped and working with the objects resumed. It could be argued that the researcher-­participant interfered with the study process and the personal progress of the individuals. Due to the researcher’s shame history in this setting and sensitivity to potentially shaming the participants by not attending to their apparent needs, the decision to provide a stronger holding environment and reduce frustration or anxiety was made. Upon reflection of the types of questions and psychological/emotional obstructions presented in the workshop, the following brief outline of the researcher’s processes in creating assemblage art was drafted as a mid-­ study modification and distributed to the participants: Finding the object: I had always noticed the out of place. As a photographer I took hundreds of photographs of found objects but when I started making assemblage art I started seeing de-­contextualized objects differently. Instead of taking a snapshot while passing them by, denying them to myself for having no practical application, I now feel justified in collecting useless objects simply because I enjoy or connect with them. I get excited when I happen upon an object that fits perfectly with a project. I troll the alleys of my town happily picking up refuse objects that I see potential and beauty in. Deconstruction: Once I have the object in my studio, I sit with it for a while. Unless I have a home for it in an existing piece, I just observe. I clear my visual field enough to give the object space. I wait and listen for direction. If nothing comes to me for a period of time that feels like enough, I start to explore. I pick the object up and get to know the form and material that comprises it. A part of me, the perfectionistic purist, is very reticent to alter the object. There is always a fear of defiling it. Once I make the first cut, remove the first screw, I begin to loosen my attachment to its original wholeness. However, I am careful to track exactly how I deconstruct the object and keep all the screws and nails and parts organized because it makes me feel I can undo what I did—that I can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Composition: I look through my homeless objects to experiment with potential relationships between them. This is one of the most playful

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   101

elements of the assemblage process for me because there are no stakes, no consequences; nothing to do besides to get tactile with the objects and use my imagination. All I am looking for is a momentary click that signals possibility and that is enough to ignite action. The composition process can take seconds or weeks. I might not find a match for the object I am working with. I may find another, unexpected connection. Sometimes finding this connection leads easily into a flow of creative work and all the elements come together in what seem like natural, albeit unlikely, combinations to form a cohesive piece. Other times it feels like a struggle from start to finish and, in truth, I may never feel satisfied with the piece. Most often, composing an assemblage piece is a combination of the two vacillating between periods of ease and periods of difficulty. Assemblage is always asking you to solve the riddle. Construction: My process has been to assemble the disparate parts then later figure out ways to arrange and affix them, how the piece would hold up in space was a secondary problem. It was not until I held my first workshop that I consciously realized how important having a base was for some of the beginning artists. Students were playing with objects and starting to get ideas then there was a lull that gave way to a theme: now what to we do? I looked at their arrangements of objects and learned of their intentions, the vision they wanted to incarnate. I suggested materials that could serve as a literal scaffolding to build off of. Because of the novelty of the objects and the combinations of materials, much of the construction process is problem solving. On hand, the assemblage artist needs enough tools to adhere things like paper to wood, wood to metal, paper to metal, plastics to glass, etc., in a variety of shapes, sizes, and densities. The more tools one is versed in, the more possibilities become apparent. Completing: Knowing when a piece is complete is not always clear. There are pieces that tell you when they are done. There are pieces that will never be complete. In some cases, you simply decide to be done. An assemblage artist once told me that she limited all her projects to three days and she never kept any object for more than two weeks if she did not have a plan for it. Though I see the wisdom in her discipline, it is a bit on the rigid side for me. At the same time, completions are difficult for many of us, including me, so deciding to complete something even if you don’t “feel” done can be an important symbolic step. With the exception of two individuals, none of the participants exhibited interest in reading the distributed material during the workshop. One participant arrived late to the workshop, took a copy of the handout, cut out all the headings, Finding the object, Deconstruction, Composition, Completing, and pasted them onto various small blocks of wood. The entire work took him less than an hour. Part of me, not the researcher, not the participant, but me outside of either role, interpreted his actions as being dismissive of the workshop. As a participant I was happy to have

102   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

another person in the group but he appeared anxious and uninterested in connecting so the overall feeling was a mix of gladness and aversion. As a researcher, I wondered how much of his behavior was related to his shame of making art. This handout could have been more effective if it were distributed in advance of the workshop. It is equally plausible that sharing my process was extraneous. On a related note, there was a general resistance to reading and signing the informed consent, completing the questionnaires, and becoming familiar with the additional research materials that were made available, such as the supplemental information about the workshop and the approved dissertation proposal. The causes for this apparent aversion or lack of interest were not investigated in this study. The participants that showed the greatest interest by reading all the materials as well as the proposal in advance of the workshop were the most prepared in terms of thoughtfully bringing personal items to use in the artwork, being aware of their shame experiences, asking study-­related questions, and contributing study-­related anecdotal material. It should be noted that for one participant English was his second language; therefore, the researcher read the materials and the questionnaires aloud to the participant upon his request. His answers were transcribed and approved by him. This participant was unable to read the extent of the proposal; however, based on what he was informed of, he came to the workshop with materials to use and with his experience of shame in mind.

Participant responses Though the study included eight participants, one participant was particularly impacted by the workshop experience in an immediate way. This participant is a 56-year-­old American caucasian female who was a professional writer and has been making collage and some assemblage art for the past three years. In her pre-­workshop questionnaire she wrote that her brother had earned the title of “artist” through his formal education but because she was not formally trained, her creative expressions could not be considered legitimate art. This essentially trivialized her artwork. Further exacerbating the belief that her art was illegitimate was that she also judged whether a person could be called an artist based on income earned from selling artwork. That is to say, if your art has never sold, you are not a real artist. She felt that if her art sold and became a lucrative business that she might consider herself an artist. Accordingly, the value of her artwork was dependent on validation by an external source, especially a powerful source such as societal buy-­in vis-­à-vis higher education and/or consumer spending. To challenge the ubiquity of this assertion, I asked her if she would apply those standards to another person who created art, to which she replied, no, that these standards only applied to her. This participant voiced that she was glad to be in an environment where she could

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   103

talk about her shame experiences. The first object she unveiled was a crucifix that she had since she was a little girl. She said that she grew up in a devout Catholic family and that religion was a significant source of her shame. During the workshop she shared two memorable examples of negative, rejecting reactions to her earlier creative work. The first example was her husband’s discovery of creating writing she had done as a younger woman. The subject matter—an adventurous single and dating woman— disturbed her husband to the extent that after he read it, he questioned whether he truly knew the woman he married. In the other case, the circumstances were quite different. She shared a script with a criminal story line that she had written more recently with a male friend. He also was disturbed upon reading this and questioned what kind of person she must be to be able to imagine such dark imagery. After the workshop process concluded, she earnestly spent time answering the questions posed in the questionnaire and, in my opinion, her experiences are best expressed in her own words. The post-­workshop questions and her answers are provided verbatim below so as to minimize the errors embedded in interpretations: 1

During the workshop were you aware of any feelings of shame? If so, describe what you were feeling ashamed of. On Day One, after seeing Deborah’s assemblage pieces I thought they were so good and there was no way I’d be able to make anything “as good.” My usual feeling of not being “good enough” and I felt a feeling of “why am I here?” I felt a tightness in my stomach and a little nauseous. Deborah was very welcoming and reassuring. I liked her vibe immediately. I loved the environment/workshop and felt very comfortable there so when I REMEMBERED the point of the workshop and listened to Deborah’s instructions and gentle reassurances, that there was going to be no judgment in the workshop, that we were there to create and talk, I relaxed and better. I began several pieces, just working with materials intuitively and got far on one piece. I took it home to continue working in my studio (which I had not been in for several months, so the workshop got me back into my work space which made me happy). On Day Two I felt so happy to be back in the workshop. Really looked forward to it. I loved that Deborah was making art too, alongside me and talking about her own feelings of shame with art making. I felt I was with an artistic peer as we discussed art and process, and felt comfortable to see that our approach was similar in many ways. The IDENTIFICATION with her as a fellow assemblage artist—we asked each other advice as we went along—really helped me. She made it a safe place. I finished my first piece and jumped into the

104   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

second that I started the day before. Deborah was generous with her materials and gave me several pieces to incorporate into my work. I left feeling really positive and motivated to make art. But I felt exhausted too … in a good way. Looked forward to Day Three, though I was very tired. I think talking a lot about my shame experiences in art making took its toll on me. Thinking/talking about art/process and making art was enervating. I did feel a little bit of shame/guilt when I borrowed Deborah’s drill and was using it incorrectly which she brought to my attention after the smell of burning wood was obvious!!! I don’t think I hurt the drill (it worked fine when I used it the correct way) but I did feel shame in that I said to myself “Stupid! You know how to use a drill and now you’ve broken hers. You’re going to buy her a new one.” I was punishing myself even before I knew the status of the drill. All this went thru my head and body and I felt flushed with embarrassment. Or was it guilt? I did do something wrong, after all. This physical feeling and judgment lasted for about 30 minutes. I felt better when the drill worked (yay!). But I am sure I would have continued to beat myself up if I had broken it. I couldn’t do a full day, because it was getting very hot in the workshop and I was very emotionally and physically tired. I did begin a third piece, working with materials on hand. I did judge it at first. I asked Deborah what she “thought” of it, artist-­to-artist, and she didn’t think it was working just yet. But I did NOT feel shame (I was conscious of registering my feeling at that point because of the workshop). The piece may not be “working” but I felt confident enough to live with it, work with it as I wanted to, and not completely scrap it based on another’s opinion. I felt that was a BIG step in healing for me. Especially as I valued Deborah’s opinion as an artist, a therapist, and as the leader of the workshop. But I remember thinking “it’s just an opinion.” She may be right. She may be wrong, but I’ll get to decide … I wanted to stick with what I was doing, but felt ready to stop for the day. I felt ok to end Day Three after a few hours, though Deborah offered to stay as long as I wanted. I just felt spent. 2

Were you aware of bodily sensations when you felt shame? Please describe: Day One of workshop I felt that I wasn’t good enough as an assemblage artist and compared myself to Deborah’s work. I felt a little queasy and flushed. Also when I felt guilt/shame/embarrassed when I thought I ruined Deborah’s drill. Also, post-­workshop (Monday–Tuesday) I had a stomachache and constipation. I was

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   105

feeling tired and wrung out after the three days and I think I was having a reaction to everything we talked about and about making so much art in three days. 3

How did you select the materials you used in your piece? Were any of the objects of particular esthetic, sentimental or monetary value? The only piece I actively selected to bring to the workshop was the crucifix that hung on my wall when I was a kid (6 years old or so into my teens). It was a plastic, about 6 inches high, and glowed in the dark (don’t know if it still possesses that power). I found it in my mother’s belongs many years ago and asked if I could have it. (She thought I wanted to hang it in my home, which I did not. I don’t know why I wanted it. I am a lapsed Catholic and I wasn’t going to hang it up, but I wanted it.) I had the crucifix in my closet for a few years and when I began making assemblage, I brought it to my studio but didn’t know what to make with it. Unrelated to the crucifix, I bought a small box with a glass front at a hardware store. Coincidentally, the crucifix fit inside the box. I kept it in the box on my worktable for about a year. When the workshop instructions were to bring in materials, I automatically grabbed that. I brought along a jar of shattered safety glass from a bus stop I collected a few years ago, I brought a few cigar boxes, a water faucet, and other detritus that I grabbed but nothing that held any personal, sentimental or monetary value except the crucifix.

4

Did you develop a relationship or have emotional responses to the objects you used in your artwork? If you altered objects, did you have any thoughts or feelings about doing so? I covered the box for the crucifix in text from a vintage Hebrew version of Genesis that Deborah gave me and I felt was perfect (I had brought an old dictionary to use to cover the box, but the Genesis text worked better). I used the shattered glass to line the back wall of the box, fitting the mostly-­square pieces together like a puzzle pieces (holding them in with a dab of glue and a piece of clear plastic over top). I had found a set of mala beads on the road a few weeks ago, and I draped that around the crucifix, which fit perfectly. I was going to GLUE the mala beads onto the crucifix, but I didn’t want to mar the crucifix in any way. I don’t know why I felt that. It was dirty and dusty and I didn’t even want to clean it, I just wanted the crucifix to be the way it was. I titled the piece “Genesis.” I really, really liked it after I finished it and it occupies a place of

106   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

prominence in my dining room. The other two pieces I made I used the objects as they were and didn’t alter in any way, except to screw or glue things onto it, or to sand the piece. “PS” was a piece made with objects I liked and selected at random and kind of played around with for the better part of Day Two: A distressed piece of wood from Deborah’s collection, something from inside a 1950s radio that belonged to my father-­in-law, a faucet with a spring coming out of it to resemble water, some kitchen items and a mini fire extinguisher (non-­functioning) that Deborah gifted me with (it seemed like it was perhaps a piece of promotional advertising). And a metal stencil with the letters “PS” that I found in a flea market store in France. I mounted it all atop a round piece of wood I found that was a “foot” on a piece of furniture. The piece called “Thin Edge of the Wedge” I began on Day Three and completed over the week. It was a box with a wooden door wedge in it with disks I painted gold. I glued used Bingo sheets on the outside sides and back and glued on a dinged doorknob, other unidentifiable hardware objects, and chess piece to the top. Inside the box: a die, a small vial with black beads, and the gold-­painted discs. When I began “Thin Edge of the Wedge” I added the wedge, thin side down, and I didn’t know what to do with it next, so I asked Deborah for her opinion. She said that she didn’t feel like it was working yet. I studied it for the rest morning and couldn’t figure what to do next. I sat with it for the majority of the next week and decided that I liked it that way (with the “Thin Edge of the Wedge” pointed down) and continued. So I think I did develop an emotional relationship to this piece. Also, I realized that when asking for someone’s opinion about a piece of art, the answer is subjective and I don’t have to accept it as “fact” or “truth.” I appreciated Deborah’s comment but found that it was ultimately not valid for the piece and what I was doing with it. (I also realized that another person cannot give a true “read” on something that has just been started and is a long way from being finished.) 5

Did you see aspects of yourself represented in the objects or final assemblage piece(s)? Yes. I felt “Genesis” had aspects of myself in that the crucifix was something from my past and something I looked at every night as a child and possibly feared (am I being a Good Catholic Girl?). I think the shattered glass, glued back together represented my struggle with faith. The mala beads (not sure they are “real” mala beads or some other religious thing) brought out aspects of my searching. I have read up on Buddhism and I meditate but I am not a Buddhist.

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   107

And the Hebrew text is an aspect of relating to Judaism. My husband is Jewish and I have always been attracted to that faith for some reason. Never pursued it or thought about converting, but something about it has held an interest for me. The “Thin Edge of the Wedge” I think held aspects of my addictive personality. I am a recovering alcoholic with 21 years of sobriety. Though that addiction has been treated successfully, I often find myself sliding into other areas of addiction–-eating, shopping, etc., I’ve never had a gambling issue, but I found myself focusing “Thin Edge of the Wedge” on gambling and gaming. I had objects like the used Bingo cards, the die, dominoes, chess piece, gold pieces was speaking to my addictive nature. The aspect of myself I see represented in “PS,” is that I think I always forgot to turn something off in the house before I leave. I didn’t start out to make a comment on that with the piece, but I was drawn to pieces that suggestion that “PS … What did you forget?” part of me. So the faucet being “turned on,” the meat thermometer, the burnt-­out electrical plug, and the fire extinguisher speak to that. 6

Did you share your assemblage with the group? If not, why? If so, describe whether you experienced shame on any level. For example, thoughts related to shame (e.g., urge to hide, critical inner dialogue, fear of exposure or judgment, mental disorganization) and/or any physical expressions of shame (e.g.: blushing, crumpled posture, awkwardness, downcast gaze). On Day One Deborah invited everyone to participate in an Art Show that was going to happen at the art studios the following Saturday. I immediately said “yes” (because I like to be included in things … not because I thought my work was so great). She left that invitation open. Didn’t push it. But it was always in the back of my mind. “I have to create something good.… people will see these … what if I put a price on them and no one buys anything.” My usual inner dialogue. At the end of the workshop, she reiterated the invitation and said that the 10 artists who had studios there were going to participate in an “Open Studio” event and I could display my pieces and bring others I had made before as well. I said “Yes” again and was initially excited, but I started to feel shame feelings the rest of the week. I did NOT invite anyone except for my husband and two close friends who have already praised my work. (I felt they were all “safe.”) I think the constipation issue I had Monday and Tuesday was exacerbated by the thought of showing my work (though I have shown my work several other times). I worked all week on finishing “Thin Edge of the Wedge” so I could show it. And I am glad I

108   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

finished it because I really liked the piece. In fact, I really liked all three of the pieces I made! Nonetheless, I kept thinking that I was going to call Deborah and bow out. I dropped off the three pieces as well as five others! I was thrilled with how Deborah was preparing the studio and how she was going to feature my work. I went home to write up an info sheet and contemplate prices. Still, I didn’t post the info about the show on my FB page until a few hours before. told anyone who asked that it wasn’t a “big deal.” All ways to “protect” myself. I thought about not going to the show and dragged myself there an hour late with hubby and friends in tow. I LOVED how the studio looked and enjoyed meeting new people and appreciated Deborah introducing me to attendees and other artists at the studios and talking about my pieces and assemblage in general. ONCE I GOT TO THE SHOW, I did not feel any shame. I held my head up proudly as The Artist. It was the time leading up to the event that I felt doubt and shame about not being “good enough.” Deborah told me that a well-­known art critic had been at the show before I got there and he liked our work. My immediate reaction was “he must have liked Deborah’s work and she just included me in the statement.” But I was happy he had stopped by (and knowing that gave me confidence to introduce myself to him at another art event last week and he remembered my name and work and we had a great talk about the show and about the Shame Study—as well as I could explain it as a participant). There were a few people at the show interested enough to inquire about buying a piece and my friend bought one. Deborah said I had priced my pieces “too low,” and I think that was another aspect of my shame about being an artist, not thinking my pieces are worthy of being purchased. But selling my work was not the reason I wanted to show. I think it really helped me in healing my shame issues. 7

Overall, did the workshop and/or questionnaire impact the way you think or experience shame related to art making? If yes, how so? YES! Very, very much. Just getting to write (in the pre-­workshop questionnaire) about shame and talk about it during the workshop, and experience it in the weeks after impacted me very much. I didn’t really THINK about shame and my art making before this (as I explained in my pre-­workshop questionnaire). How I wasn’t “qualified” to be an artist because I didn’t go to art school, can’t draw or paint, and that my brother who is an artist and working on his PhD is the ONLY artist in the family. I studied writing and while I have shame issues around that as well, it was making assemblage/ collage when I began to question my “right” to make art. And was

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   109

“gluing shit onto canvas” REALLY art. I had a lot of shame issues. The workshop seemed to be custom-­made for me (and I wish I could have brought along a few other assemblage friends who also have shame-­based issues, I now realize). I loved being able to “just talk” about it on Day One. I think because I have done therapy for years and have 21 years in AA I am used to “sharing” so I did not feel self-­conscious about talking about my history. (I did feel self-­ conscious a bit about taking up all the time but the other two participants didn’t seem to want to talk.) In a way, I felt “obligated” to share my Shame History as I was in this study and I wanted to be a “Good Participant” (like being a “Good Catholic Girl”) and wanted Deborah to get something out of my participation, if that makes sense. But talking soooo much and making art, really exhausted me (not in a bad way), but then I think everything I talked about started to have an effect on me (see constipation discussion above). And then I started to have doubts about showing my work at the Art Show. I hadn’t been working in my art studio for many months. I had more to do with mourning my dog who used to accompany me there and she had passed away. Then it was so hot. Then it was so messy and the spiders overran the place, and the construction site next door put a thick layer or dust on everything, blah-­blah-blah. But taking the workshop got me back into the studio. I did a day-­ long vacuum and spider exorcism, and began going through my materials again. That is directly because of the workshop. I made a piece that Deborah had given an opinion on that was contrary to my thoughts on it and I learned and put into action the idea that an opinion is not TRUTH or FACT and I can listen to an opinion and still go my own way without shame or doubt (that was a BIG realization). Though uncomfortable at first, I was glad I participated in the Art Show and stood proudly to talk about my work. It felt really good. I felt I achieved a lot in this workshop. I don’t think it “cured” my shame, but allowed me to “look it in the eye” and know what it is and deal with it in a better way. Not to hide my art or hide myself. I feel I can call myself an artist now and not say it with “air quotes.”

I have been in periodic contact with the participant discussed above. She has continued with her art work and completed a home studio. She reports taking the benefits of the workshop into her life while acknowledging she still battles with shame. The following paragraphs consist of synopses of only the most salient responses from other participants. All participants revealed complex relationships to shame and art making. Most of the surveys contained seemingly contradictory responses. Not all of the participants completed the post-­workshop questionnaire so attempts to follow

110   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

up by other means (e.g., telephone, email) were made. Participants generally enjoyed the workshop agreeing that they would repeat the workshop and felt that additional workshops would be beneficial to their creative processes and mental health. An American caucasian female participant in her mid-­thirties reported: several years ago I became certified in expressive arts therapy which was a wonderful experience creating art and sharing it and examining what was produced from a psychological perspective. I imagine this workshop may include some aspects of that even if not planned or inherent in your project. I am leaving for an annual pilgrimage to the desert shortly after the workshop so I think I will appreciate shifting into another aspect of consciousness via creating art. Notably, her responses to the questions posed did not appear to be internally consistent. She wrote: I think anyone who makes art is an artist, but I think society’s perception is that someone is an artist only is what they produce is seen as “worthy.” Despite this definition, I create art, but don’t see myself as an artist. The contradiction here is apparent between the standard she applies to others versus herself. By her definition, she makes art, therefore, she is an artist; however, she does not feel herself to be. With respect to sharing her art she wrote, “I generally only share when others want to see. I just don’t know if anyone would be interested.” This is an unexpected attitude based on what might be assumed from her positive experience making and sharing art during her training to be an expressive arts therapist. Her responses conveys a possible compartmentalization of experiences between making and sharing her own art produced outside the educational institution, identification with the title of artist, and her work as an expressive arts therapist. Evidenced by her chosen profession, she understands the tremendous value of art yet she has reticence about the claiming the artist title for herself and the value of her own artwork. An American caucasian male participant in his early forties also demonstrated a complex, even contradictory relationship to being an artist and sharing art. He wrote: There is no distinction between being an artist and being someone who makes art … if its art, if you made it, if you believe you are an artist then you are … caveat; if you do’t think you are an artist, case might be made that you are not … but i bet art would be used to make the argument.

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   111

He surmises that by virtue of making art, a person is an artist despite employing the title. His response to the question: What is your past experience with making art? Do you currently have a form of artistic expression? is of particular interest as it reveals the conflict between art and shame, “i am an artist, i make art, i curate shows, i hold a BFA from CalArts and yet, i am ashamed to emerge … .” He demonstrated a split between the artist identity who shares art and how he sees himself when he is not performing art when he wrote, “always down to share w people … i do perf based work, i imagine NONe of my collaborators and friends and audience would ever think i feel like yikes, i am afraid to leave the house.” Here we see a pole of opposites between the performer and the private fearful self. In response to the question: What role, if any, does shame play in your ability to express yourself artistically? Said in another way, do you feel that fear of failure or making a mistake, embarrassment, or other self-­ conscious emotions stop you from creating or sharing your art work? he responded, “this is what drew me to the study … i am feeling like bc of the shame over body issues … i could almost waste half my life holding back … but hopeully we will turn that around.” His awareness of the relationship between shame and self-­expression exhibits a fairly high degree of awareness and willingness to self-­examine. Additionally, it is less common for men to experience shame over body image. Despite the enforcement of confidentiality, in my estimation, this disclosure likely required a degree of courage and vulnerability. Though this participant was cognitively aware of shame, he reported that he could not identify the bodily sensations of shame. This is an unsurprising response as many experience self-­alienation and a severe lack of interoceptive ability. In response to the question: If shame were less of an inhibiting factor for you, can you describe how it might impact making and/or sharing your artwork? he wrote, “whole life would be different.” This participant did not complete a post-­workshop survey but he has remained in contact. Since the workshop, he has curated two art shows, he has shown his own work, and is currently developing a fundraiser for women’s reproductive health using work from local artists, including himself. Another female participant in her thirties wrote, “we are all artists—it’s a matter of tapping into our own unique creative outlets and expression,” and, “I have been a writer/editor, actress and jewelry designer; also have dabbled in mosaic design and painting. As an MFT, I truly believe therapy is an art.” She reported having shared her art and that it was well received. In response to the survey question: What role, if any, does shame play in your ability to express yourself artistically? Said in another way, do you feel that fear of failure or making a mistake, embarrassment, or other self-­ conscious emotions stop you from creating or sharing your art work? she wrote, “self-­doubt; self-­conscience/body conscious in the acting world.” From these responses it appears that she has been able to work through

112   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

self-­consciousness to express herself creatively in multiple ways. In response to the question: If shame were less of an inhibiting factor for you, can you describe how it might impact making and/or sharing your artwork? she wrote, “lots more freedom of expression.” Despite overcoming self-­consciousness enough to make art historically, she is aware that shame is an inhibiting factor. After the workshop she reported feeling a greater sense of confidence is sharing her art, which she attributed to creating in a safe space with accepting people who were also working through shame. A Mexican Latino male participant age 26 wrote: Everyone is an artist. Your skill depends on your level of dedication with time, practice, and quality training. How much you get paid depends on your marketing. Who hires you or will display your work depends on your networking. I see myself as a conceptual artist, i value the idea over the execution. He represents one of two participants who considered the commercial aspect of making art. In response to the complete survey question: What role, if any, does shame play in your ability to express yourself artistically? Said in another way, do you feel that fear of failure or making a mistake, embarrassment, or other self-­conscious emotions stop you from creating or sharing your art work? he wrote,  I am not at all “afraid” of “failure.” Fear is not even the right word. Fear is associated with survival, so I am afraid of a car running me over. But I am not “afraid” of people not liking my work. I expect few to really understand it, and i already know that it is typically lower quality than many artists work. But I take pride in the fact that I can engage better with my audience with it. I take the time to tell the story, my reasoning, talk about my process, answer their questions, validate their feelings when they talk about what they see, etc. To: Are you aware of what your body experiences when you feel shame? he responded, “what? i don’t feel shame about my body. Sure I could use improvement but so can everyone.” In response to the question: If shame were less of an inhibiting factor for you, can you describe how it might impact making and/or sharing your artwork? he responded, “agghhhh i don’t care!!! i share anyways.” Taken together these responses could be interpreted as defensive reactions to the content of questions that were psychoactivating for the participant. As a caveat, it is possible that culture and language impeded the participant’s comprehension of the questions. His responses are double layered with one layer consisting of an apparent confidence bordering on grandiosity and another layer consisting of

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   113

self-­deprecation and self-­protection. This pattern is apparent in these sentences: “i already know that it is typically lower quality than many artists work. But I take pride in the fact that I can engage better with my audience with it.” There is a tendency here to elevate the self and his project needs onto an audience with the co-­occurring illusion that he himself needs nothing including validation of his art. In the responses he provided, we can see that he sets up a scenario to qualify his art through stating that concept is more important that execution. Thus, he had already justified that his art was understood by very few and that it was low quality. He further validates the scantly understood, low quality work by stating that he’s proud because he can engage his audience better. The implication being that artists whose work is well understood and of higher quality as not as adept as the participant is in engaging their audiences. There is a pendulation occurring with respect to his art and sense of self. This is likely happening below the level of conscious awareness as defensive structures are in play. In response to the question: What is your level of familiarity with assemblage art or working with found objects? he wrote: I was exposed to it by my uncle when I was a child. Mexicans love assemblage, we just don’t pretentiously display it in galleries and make a parade about it. maybe that is why i do not feel shame about what I make? because we all made art since childhood. He adds an interesting perspective here that he attributes to his Mexican culture and speculates as to why that is the reason he does not feel shame about making art. The shaming or condemnation is other-­directed we, referring to Mexicans, don’t pretentiously display and make a parade about it. This other who parades and pretentiously display art could be interpreted as the dominant culture that he does not feel himself a part of. Though Mexican, the participant was living in United States. It is common in the United States for financially privileged Americans to be seen as elitists who consume and support such cultural styles as opera, symphony orchestras, ballet, fine art, museums and galleries, and theater. The aggrandizement of high art versus folk art, for instance, could be viewed as a social justice issue. To the final question posed: If you have any dreams, images, fantasies, hopes, and/or expectations about this process, please feel free to share them here he responded: I would like to be more emotionally “free” to express myself more. And I feel that I do that better emotionally rather than orally. There is definitely shame there, as men, especially Hispanic men, and military veterans are taught to not get all “emotional” but that is often only judged by actions and words. but art remains free as those idiots that would judge that are too stupid to understand art.

114   Interpretive phenomenological analysis

Here we have a direct view of the shame dynamic of the participant. He experiences a lack of freedom based on his native masculine hispanic culture. The anger he expresses is consistent with reports of how men display and hide shame. To note, these interpretation are conjecture and not based on conversations with the participant as he was unavailable for post-­workshop surveys. An American female participant in her thirties responded to the question: Who qualifies as an “artist” in your opinion? Is there any distinction between being an artist and being a person who makes art? Please describe how you see yourself in this regard as follows: This is a big question that can be explored from so many angles. I don’t think there is a distinction between being an artist and being a person who makes art. One can make a distinction between an artist and a “professional artist,” meaning one who pursues art as a profession. Someone who pursues art as a profession. To just speak of being an “artist” I think is more about a way of perceiving and interacting with the world. A perception that seeks out nuance, beauty, meaning, and expression in places, people, and experiences. The way an artist interacts with the world is to also flip that equation, an artist will take there interactions with people, experiences, and objects and seek to create something of beauty, nuance, expression, etc. Her responses show a degree of thoughtfulness on the subject and sees artist as “a way of being” in addition to being a profession—something one does. In response to the question: What role, if any, does shame play in your ability to express yourself artistically? Said in another way, do you feel that fear of failure or making a mistake, embarrassment, or other self-­ conscious emotions stop you from creating or sharing your art work? she wrote: I’d say that those fears are more prohibitive to actually creating; rather than sharing. Once I’ve moved past fear, and begun the creative process I feel quite free. It can be challenging for me to share if I’m in a workshop setting and we’re spontaneously given some sort of creative project. I worry that what I make will be crappier than everyone else’s. If I can enter into the spirit of play, it’s much easier for me to let go of those fears. She displays some anticipatory shame based on past experiences of creating art in a workshop; notwithstanding, she still engaged fully in the study. She stated that though she had done many art works in various forms, she  can imagine herself making art much more often if shame was not present.

Interpretive phenomenological analysis   115

An English male participant age 40 wrote: An artist is somebody who actively follows their creative impulses and makes art. I think there is a distinction between being an “artist” and somebody who “makes art.” You could easily throw some paint on a canvas and call it an art piece, but I don’t believe that makes you an artist. I believe the term “artist” must involve some sort of “artistry,” that involves considered creative decisions, experimentation and thought. Although I think there are almost levels to this. In the same way that there is between a chef and somebody who cooks. I like to draw, although i wouldn’t ever tell anybody i was an “artist.” I think I would be embarrassed by being described as an “artist.” If I was doing it professionally then perhaps I would. That response notwithstanding, he shared that he liked to sketch and create cartoon illustrations. He admitted to having had small successes, including having cartoons published. Despite being a published cartoonist, he would be embarrassed if he was called an artist. Based on these responses, he holds the label of artist to a set of expectations that are higher than what he has achieved. In response to the questions regarding sharing his artwork he wrote: I don’t go out of my way to share artistic creations with people and even then I would usually only do so with friend and family. I don’t feel comfortable trying to expose my art to a greater audience. I would definitely feel embarrassed sharing my work with people i didn’t know. I don’t like to feel humiliated especially if i think the work i’m sharing is inadequate. As established previously the essence of shame is losing face or feeling inadequate under the gaze of others. He went on to write that if shame were less of an inhibiting factor, “I’d post my artwork everywhere and wouldn’t care what people thought. I would actively ask others to help me in getting my work noticed.” We can see that his breadth of experience is actually altered by shame; it’s safer not to share my art than to share and feel shame. To the question regarding his hopes for the workshop he wrote: I am only imagining that what I come up with will be pretty poor. I can’t imagine my first attempt at this is going to look anything more than a pile of rubbish but I’d like to see what that rubbish looks like all the same. Assuming that what he creates will be poor is a key thought pattern in people living with chronic shame; however, he has developed enough strength and/or curiosity to participate in the workshop.

Chapter 7

Conclusions

This study demonstrates that shame did not prevent the participants from art making but shame still served to inhibit full creative self-­expression. The sample size of this population and the short-­term duration of the study preclude making a direct comparison between the heuristic study as I spent over a year working from debilitating shame to artist expression. The participant study confirmed that for most of the participants’ shame and self-­conscious emotions were triggered when engaging with unfamiliar physical and psychic material in the art making opportunity provided in this study. As demonstrated by the participant responses, it could be argued that a greater degree of artists expression did occur to a greater or lesser extent. For some participants this occurred as insight as to their relationship to art making and their understanding of shame. In one case, the participant stated that she learned that the anticipation of the creative process and the possibility of making a mistake frequently prevented her from starting the art projects she envisions. The sentiment was expressed by most of the other participants as well. The healing opportunity for her also came in the form of permission. During the workshop, she became unstuck when she gave herself permission to let go of a piece she was working on and start something new. The participants reported that, despite self-­criticism and negative evaluation of their work as compared to others, creating in shared space with other people making art was overall a positive experience. This is consistent with the Dr. Porges’ theory that mental health requires activation of the social engagement system. This system goes offline when shame takes hold. When reading the participant feedback, reflecting on my own process, and considering what opportunities the workshop provided, themes of permission and completion arose. The theme of permission to proceed was present throughout the workshop. Often my guidance was sought before participants could give themselves permission to proceed in a creative direction they were uncertain of. One participant worked more independently and only sought advisement once thought the three-­day workshop. The acts of permission and completion proved fundamental to whether one

Conclusions   117

starts and/or finishes a project. The workshop demonstrated that it was important to create a sense that the participants had permission to play, to construct, to deconstruct, to fuck up, to destroy, to beautify, to love, to hate their assemblages and the objects used in them. An example of this occurred on within the first hour of the workshop; I gave one participant permission to tear a page out of my book. I hesitate to write that I “gave permission” to her because it indicates that I have power over another person, which brings up multitudinous conflicts in me, a discussion of which is not within the defined scope this research. In short, deep shame distorts one’s sense of authority and autonomy. This research’s conclusions present us with unanswered questions as the participant study design did to achieve results extensive enough to substantiate the validity of the personal process I underwent during the heuristic investigation. I knew that the workshop could not emulate my months of working with shame and assemblage art but my aspiration was to share what progress I had made to see if others could benefit and achieve freer artistic expression. Such a workshop would have been sufficient to effectuate my shame of making art based on my idiosyncratic, subject life experiences as well as the vulnerability of my physiology to feel shame. There was no control in place to identify a participant population with similar shame vulnerability. The only control in place was interest; in other words, the only requirement was interest in the study and participation in the workshop. Participation in the study only indicated that a person had curiosity and some awareness that shame was interfering with the making of art. As discussed above, only one of eight participants was substantially affected by the study. The completion of the Moustakas’ phases of inquiry and the formal participant study did not represent the termination of my study of shame and the self. I have found more direct yet still non-­antagonistic ways to approach shame, most notably through movement and therapeutic touch. These activities address the body and activate physiological, emotional, and psychological that progressively allow shame to be experienced non-­ verbally first and then articulated through cognitive awareness. That said I would have not made my way to those practices had I not started developing a more conscious relationship to my shame through making new bodies and containers in assemblage art pieces first. My body alerted me to my shame without cognition; then my cognition led me to seek expression; and my creative expression led me back to the body.

Areas for further study This section explains the ways in which this study is limited in its scope and function and how it departs from certain depth psychological assumptions. Where the research is not faithful to Jungian and post-­Jungian theory

118   Conclusions

it is explained when germane throughout this study. Additionally, Jung’s Red Book is rich with artwork that may alter the way we understand his relationship to art making. A thorough study of that topic is likely underway by several researchers. This study aimed to work within these limits with the aspiration of finding broader applicability despite the particularity of the perceptions, theories, methods, and experiences presented herein. This research does not pretend to eliminate existing biases but acknowledges them as having an inextricable influence on the researcher and the study parameters. One major limitation of this study is that it, both intentionally and unintentionally, incorporates quintessentially Western paradigms that impact our psychologies. In my observation, some of these Western leanings include but are decidedly not limited to: individualism, Judeo-­Christian dogmas, patriarchy, capitalism, and scientism. On the simplest level, because I am a White adult American female with an advanced college degree, I carry a specific worldview, which is a limit in itself. Additionally, I have had the privilege of long-­term mentorship in my field, psychotherapeutic treatment, and studying diverse forms of alternative healing, which places me in a small segment of the total population. With respect to depth psychology and this study’s use of Jungian theories, it is important to note that Jung himself specified that most of his patients had some history of psychotherapeutic experience before starting analysis; that roughly a third of them had not been diagnosed with a neurosis; and that two thirds of his patients were in their second half of life. He further described most of them as being socially well-­adapted and having outstanding ability, which he uses to explain why the therapeutic technique referred to as normalization has no real impact for such patients; rational treatment is all but abandoned in favor of helping the client develop latent creative possibilities. This study is heavily influenced by the work of Jung and his successors partially because the researcher reflects the above-­ described patient population characteristics. Thus, in terms of the heuristic portion of this study, this orientation has great utility. In term of limitations, this description of Jung’s patients is noteworthy as the approach used with a population such as this is likely to be quite different than the  approach a clinician might use with psychotic patients, for example. Therefore, this research acknowledges its potentially narrow range of applicability. As a field, depth psychology’s values are demonstrated by the use of terms such as wholeness, unity, oneness, integration, and completion, which are widely accepted in its nomenclature and relate to Jung’s ultimate goal of individuation. Hillman surmises that Jung’s drive for wholeness was evidenced partially by his identification with the mandala as a self-­ symbol, this enclosed circular, containing object, was a defense against fragmentation (1972, p.  34). Many post-­Jungians have described Jung’s attempt to encompass selfhood in words as being ambiguous and

Conclusions   119

contradictory at times and unavoidably reflective of Jung’s own inner turmoil and strivings. There is no current consensus as to what the nature of the self is and how to heal psychological afflictions, which makes the field of depth psychology vulnerable to internal divisions, making it difficult to establish its place among the mainstream psychologies. In my clinical experience, I have not found that attempting to locate a singular self or to transcend the immediacy of earthly experience, biasing internal development over outer, was the path to healing for the specific population I worked with, or me, since concepts based on inner unity occurred as abstractions that were too closely tied to the ideal of perfection, triggering the very issues we were grappling with. In short, the sought-­for ideal of perfection was unattainable, reinforcing existing shame and creating secondary shame. As such, this study is not explicitly driven by such concepts as unity or individuation. Furthermore, psychologists have a reputation for sitting in their ivory towers while patients scramble in the dirt below. This may partly be due to our use of jargon, especially in the presence of patients, which has the effect of alienation. This research aims to be comprehensible beyond the immediate depth psychological community so the use of words that are designed to hold and convey complex ideas but fail, as they are often misunderstood even by depth psychologists, are avoided where possible. As demonstrated in the literature review as well as in the heuristic investigation, gender plays a significant role in shame. Concern over the loss of complexity including the oppression of not only women but devaluation of archetypally feminine principals continues to be expressed explicitly through scholarship, social movements and in media of all forms. However, despite the massive advances gained through the suffrage, civil rights, and feminist movements we are still in crisis. Thus, the early stages of research had a distinct focus on the experience of women and gender roles.

References

Ainley, V., & Tsakiris, M. (2013). Body conscious? Interoceptive awareness, measured by heartbeat perception, is negatively correlated with self-­objectification. PLoS ONE, 8(2), e55568. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055568. Ainsworth, M. D., & Bell, S. M. (1970). Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-­year-olds in a strange situation. Child Development, 41, 49–67. Allan, K. (2005). Reflections on Walter Hopps in Los Angeles. X-­Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, 8. Retrieved from http://x-­traonline.org/article/ reflections-­on-walter-­hopps-in-­los-angeles/#refmark-­19. Allen, P. (1995). Art is a way of knowing: A guide to self-­knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through creativity. Boston: Shambhala Publications. Assemblage. (n.d.). In Philip Cooper (Ed.), Grove art online. In the Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved from www.moma.org/collection_ge/theme.php?theme_ id=10057 (as cited on the Museum of Modern Art website, 2015). Atkins, R. (2013). ArtSpeak (3rd ed.). New York: Abbeville Press. Ayers, M. Y. (2011). Masculine shame. From succubus to the eternal feminine. London and New York: Routledge. Baltzly, D. (2013). Stoicism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/ stoicism. (Original work published 1996.) Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination. Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. New York: Routledge. Bayles, D., & Orland, T. (2012). Art and fear: Observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking. Eugene, OR: Image Continuum Press. Bente, F., & Dau, W. H. T. (Trans.) (1921). Triglot Concordia: The symbolical books of the Ev. Lutheran Church. St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House. Bishop, P. (1995). The Dionysian self: C. G. Jung’s reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter. Blakemore, C., & Jennett, S. (2008). Shame. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from: www.encyclopedia.com/ history/historians-­and-chronicles/historians-­british/shame#shame. Bolen, J. (2014). Gods in everyman, archetypes that shape men’s lives. New York: HarperCollins. (Original work published 1989.) Bradshaw, J. (2005). Healing the shame that binds you (Rev. ed.). Deerfield Beach, FL: HCI. (Original work published 1988.)

References   121 Breedlove, S., Watson, N., & Rosenzweig, M. (2010). Biological psychology: An introduction to behavioral and cognitive neuroscience (6th ed.). Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc. Broucek, F. (1991). Shame and the self. New York: The Guilford Press. Brown, B. (2012). Men, women, and worthiness: The experience of shame and the power of being enough. [Audiobook]. Sounds True. Brown, J. D., & Marshall, M. A. (2001). Self-­esteem and emotion: Some thoughts about feelings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 575–584. Cardinal, R. (1972). Outsider art. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Carotenuto, A. (1989). Eros and Pathos: Shades of love and suffering. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books. Chodorow, J. (1991). Dance therapy and depth psychology. London: Routledge. Clay, G. (2015). An interview with John Bradshaw on the Mankind Project. Retrieved from http://menstuff.org/columns/overboard/bradshawj.html. Coogan, Michael D. (2009). A brief introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in its context. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Coppin, J., & Nelson, E. (2005). The art of inquiry: A depth psychological perspective. Putnam, CT: Spring. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: HarperPerennial. DeYoung, P. (2015). Understanding and treating chronic shame: A relational/­ neurobiological approach. New York: Routledge. Dickerman, L. (2013). Rauschenberg canyon. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Dickerson, S., Gruenewald, T., & Kemeny, M. (2004). When the social self is threatened: Shame, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality, 72(6), 1191–1216. Duchamp, M. (1957). The creative act. From Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts. Houston: TX. Edelman, S. P. (1998). Turning the gorgon: A meditation on shame. Woodstock, CT: Spring. Edinger, E. (1991). Anatomy of the psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy (Reality of the Psyche Series). Chicago: Open Court. Edwards, M. (1987). Jungian analytic art therapy. In J. Rubin (Ed.), Approaches to art therapy: Theory and technique. New York: Brunner/Mazel, Inc. Ellenberger, F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Erickson, E. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). New York: Norton. Evans, A. (1988). The god of ecstasy: Sex roles and the madness of Dionysus. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Fossum, M., & Mason, M. (1986). Facing shame: Families in recovery. New York: Norton. Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T. A. (1997). Objectification theory. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 173–206. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00108.x. Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1930.)

122   References Freud, S. (1964). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 22). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1933.) Fromm, E. (1994). Escape from freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. (Original work published 1941.) Gnuse, R. K. (1997). No other gods: Emergent monotheism in Israel. New York: Continuum. Gratz, K. L., Rosenthal, M. Z., Tull, M. T., Lejeuz, C. W., & Gunderson, J. G. (2010). An experimental investigation of emotional reactivity and delayed emotional recovery in borderline personality disorder: The role of shame. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 51, 275–285. Greene, A. (2015). Lecture archetypal affects: Shame/contempt. [Video file]. United States: The Jung Association of Western Massachusetts. Retrieved from www. youtube.com/watch?v=fXp9k8pLzgk. Guggenheim. (2015). Kurt Schwitters 1887–1948. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from www.dadart.com/dadaism/dada/038-Schwitters.html. Guney, H. (2015). On Sartre and self-­consciousness. Retrieved from www.­ janushead.org/JHSummer98/HulyaGuney.cfm. Hammer Museum. (2014). Lunchtime art talk recap: Wallace Berman’s seminar 2. Retrieved from http://hammer.ucla.edu/blog/2014/06/lunchtime-­art-talk-­recapwallace-­bermans-semina-­2/. Haidt, J., & Keltner, D. (1999). Culture and facial expression: Open-­ended methods find more expressions and a gradient of recognition. Cognition and Emotion, 13(3), 225–266. Harker, L. A., & Keltner, D. (1998). Shame: Interpersonal behavior, psychopathology, and culture (P. Gilbert & B. Andrews, Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press. Heid, M. (2014). You asked: Why are people addicted to CrossFit and other brutal workouts? Time. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from http://time.com/3083506/ you-­asked-why-­are-people-­addicted-to-­crossfit-and-­other-brutal-­workouts/. Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hillman, J. (1975). Re-­visioning psychology. New York: HarperPerennial. Hillman. J. (1981). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Dallas, TX: Spring. Hillman, J. (2000). Image-­sense. In B. Sells (Ed.), Working with images: The theoretical base of archetypal psychology (pp. 170–183). Woodstock, CT: Spring. Hoppe, M., Tillman, M., & Wheater, T. (2001). The waiting. Valley Entertainment. Huskinson, L. (2004). Nietzsche and Jung. New York: Brunner-­Routledge. Husserl, E. (1969). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). The Hague, The Netherlands: Nijhoff. (Original work published 1950.) Hutcheson, F. (2007). Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria with a short introduction to moral philosophy, edited and with an introduction by Luigi Turco. Indianapolis, IL: Liberty Fund. (Original work published 1747.) Jacoby, M. (1991). Shame and the origins of self-­esteem. New York: Routledge.

References   123 Johnson, R. (1993). Owning your own shadow: Understanding the dark side of the psyche. New York: HarperCollins. Jung, C. G. (1928). Two essays on analytical psychology. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 7). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1917.) Jung, C. G. (1960). Terry lectures: Psychology and religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Based on the Terry Lectures delivered in 1938.) Jung, C. (1961). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffe, Ed.) (R. & C. Winston, Trans.). New York: Random House, Inc. Jung, C. G. (1969a). On the nature of the psyche. In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954.) Jung, C. G. (1969b). On psychic energy. In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, 2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928.) Jung, C. G. (1969c). Psychology and religion: West and east. In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 11). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1937.) Jung, C. (1969d). The Transcendent Function. In Adler, G. & Hull, R. (Eds.), ­Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche (pp. 67–91). Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. Retrieved from www. jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhr1w.7. Jung, C. G. (1969e). The psychology of the transference. In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 16). Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1946.) Jung, C. G. (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis. In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 14, 2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1955–1956.) Jung, C. G. (1971). The type problem in aesthetics. In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 6, 2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921.) Jung, C. G. (1974). Dreams. In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.) (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 22). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1988). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the seminar given in 1934–1939 (James L. Jarrett Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1934.) Jung, C. G. (1997). Jung on active imagination, edited and with an introduction by Joan Chodorow. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (2009). The red book: Liber novus (S. Shamdasani, Ed.) (S. Shamdasani, M. Kyburz, & J. Peck, Trans.). New York: Norton. Jung, C. G., von Franz, M-­L., Henderson, J. L., Jacobi, J., & Jaffe, A. (1964). Man and his symbols. London: Aldus Books. Junge, M. B. (2010). The modern history of art therapy in the United States. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Kalsched, D. (1996). The inner world of trauma: Archetypal defenses of the personal spirit. New York: Routledge.

124   References Kast, V. (1993). Imagination as a space of freedom: Dialogue between the ego and the unconscious. New York: Fromm International. (Original work published in 1988 as Imagination als raum der freiheit.) Kaufman, G. (1989). The psychology of shame. New York: Springer. Kaufman, G. (1992). Shame: The power of caring. Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books. Kerenyi, C. (1976). Dionysos, archetypal image of indestructible life (R. Manheim Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kingston, W. (1983). A theoretical context for shame. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 64, 213–226. Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. (2009). Interviews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Sage. Lanchner, C. (2009). Robert Rauschenberg. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Leary, M., & Tangney, J. (2010). Handbook of self and identity. New York: Guilford Press. Levy, B. (2000). Pedagogy: Incomplete, unrequited. In C. O’Farrell, D. Meadmore, E. McWilliam, & C. Symes (Eds.), Taught bodies (pp.  81–90). New York: Peter Lang. Lewis, H. (1971). Shame and guilt in neurosis. New York: International Universities Press. Lewis, M. (1992). Shame: The exposed self. New York: Free Press. Lipps, T. (1903). Einfühlung, innere nachahmung, and organempfindungen. Archiv fiir die gesamte Psvchologiue, 2, 185–204. Locke, J. (1689). Other considerations concerning innate principles, both speculative and practical. In An essay concerning human understanding. Retrieved from http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/761. Luther, M. (1921). The large catechism. In F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau (Trans.), Triglot Concordia: The symbolical books of the Ev. Lutheran Church. St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House. Marter, J. (2011). The Grove encyclopedia of American art (Vol. 1). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Maudlin, J. G. (2006). Teaching bodies: Curriculum and corporeality. Retrieved http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1469& context=etd. May, R. (1975). The courage to create. New York: Norton. Merleau-­Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1945.) Meyer-­Buser, S., & Orchard, K. (2000). In the beginning was Merz, from Kurt Schwitters to the present day. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-­Ruit. Metcalf, R. (2006). Studies in the history of ethics unrequited narcissism: On the origin of shame. Retrieved June 17, 2017, from www.historyofethics.org/ 092006/MetcalfUnrequitedNarcissism.pdf. Miller, S. (1985). The shame experience. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Moon, C. H. (2010). Materials & media in art therapy: Critical understandings of diverse artistic vocabularies. New York: Routledge. Morrison, A. P. (1998). The breadth and boundaries of a self-­psychological immersion in shame: A one and a half person perspective. Retrieved from http://icpla.edu/.

References   125 Moustakas, C. (1990). Heuristic research: Design, methodology and application. London: Sage. Museum of Modern Art. (2015). Dada. Retrieved from www.moma.org/learn/ moma_learning/themes/dada. Nathanson, D. (1992). Shame and pride: Affect, sex, and the birth of the self. New York: Norton. National Gallery of Art. (2015). The collection: Kienholz, Edward. Retrieved from www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-­i nfo.2140.html?artobj_ artistId=2140&pageNumber=1. Neumann E. (1966). Art and the creative unconscious: Four essays (R. Manheim, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1959.) Neumann, E. (1979). Creative man. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Neumann, E. (1989). The place of creation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nummenmaa, L., Glereana, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2013). Bodily maps of emotions. Retrieved June 29, 2017, from www.pnas.org/content/111/2/646.full. Padel, R. (1995). Whom gods destroy: Elements of Greek and tragic madness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Patton, M. Q. (1990). Qualitative evaluation and research methods (2nd ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Perera, S. B. (1986). The scapegoat complex: Toward a mythology of shadow and guilt. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books. Pinkola-­Estes, C. (2005). The creative fire. (CD). Abridged. Louisville, CO: Sounds True. Porges, S. W. (2007). The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology, 74(2), 116–143. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.06.009. Porges, S. W. (2009). The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 76(2), S86–S90. http://doi.org/10.3949/ccjm.76.s2.17. Rohleder, N., Chen, E., Wolf, J., & Miller, G. (2008). The psychobiology of trait shame in young women: Extending the social self preservation theory. Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, Vol. 27, No. 5. Romanyshyn, R. (2007). The wounded researcher: Research with soul in mind. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books. Schmitter, A. (2014, Spring). 17th and 18th century theories of emotions. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives. Schwitters, K. (1921). Merz construction. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Retrieved from www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/53863.html. Schore, A. N. (2015). Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. London: Psychology Press & Routledge Classic Editions. Seaford, R. (2006). Dionysos. London: Routledge. Seiden, D. (2001). Mind over matter: The uses of materials in art, education, and therapy. Chicago: Magnolia Street. Seitz, W. (1961). The art of assemblage. Museum of Modern Art. New York: Plantin Press.

126   References Self. [Def. 1]. (n.d.). Oxford dictionaries. Retrieved from www.oxforddictionaries. com/us/definition/american_english/self. Shame. (2014). Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved from http://dictionary. reference.com/browse/shame. Shanes, E. (2009). Pop art. New York: Parkstone International. Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Retrieved from www.innercitybooks.net/pdf/books/junglexicon.pdf. Shultz, J. (2013). Shame. Retrieved from www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/ analytical-­psychology/776-shame. Smith, J. A. (2008). Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Sage. Smithsonian. (2001). Wallace Berman papers, 1907–1979, bulk 1955–1979. A  Finding Aid. Archives of American Art. Retrieved from www.aaa.si.edu/­ collections/wallace-­berman-papers-­10771/. Sobel, B. (1956). A pictorial history of burlesque. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Staples, L. (2009). The creative soul: Art and the quest for wholeness. Carmel, CA: Fisher King Press. Stoller, R. J. (1979). Sexual excitement: Dynamics of erotic life. New York: Pantheon Books. Stolorow, R. (2013) The shame family: Many emotional states have shame at their core. Retrieved from www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-­relating-existing/ 201310/the-­shame-family. Sznycer, D., Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., Porat, R., Shalvi, S., & Halperin, E. (2016). Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures. PNAS, 113(10), 2625–2630. Retrieved January 18, 2017, from www.pnas.org/ content/113/10/2625.full.pdf. Tangney, J. (1991). Moral affect: The good, the bad, and the ugly. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(4), 598–607. Tangney, J., Miller, R. S., Flicker, L., & Barlow, D. (1996). Are shame, guilt, and embarrassment distinct emotions? Journal of Personality Social Psychology, 70, 1256–1269. Timmons, D. (2008). A wink and a smile: The art of burlesque. Seattle, WA: Golden Echo Films. Tomkins, S. (1963). Affect, imagery, consciousness. Vol. 2: The negative affects. New York: Springer. Tomkins, S. (1987a). Script theory. In J. Aronoff, A. I. Rabin, & R. A. Zucker (Eds.), The emergence of personality (pp. 147–216), New York: Springer. Tomkins, S. (1987b). Shame. In D. Nathanson (Ed.), The many faces of shame. New York: Guilford Press. Tomkins, S. (2008). Affect imagery consciousness: The complete edition. New York: Springer. Ulanov, A. B. (2013). Madness & creativity. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Underland-­Rosow, V. (1995). Shame: Spiritual suicide. Shorewood, MN: Waterford. van den Berk, T. (2012). Jung on art: The autonomy of the creative drive. New York: Routledge. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score. New York: Viking.

References   127 von Franz, M-­L. (1980). Projection and re-­collection in Jungian psychology. La Salle, IL: Open Court. von-­Franz, M-­L. (1997). Archetypal dimensions of the psyche. London: Shambhala. Voorhies, J. (2014). Surrealism. Department of European Paintings. The Metropolitan Museum. Retrieved from www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm. Waldman, D. (2002). Joseph Cornell: Master of dreams. New York: Abrams. White, W., Boyle, M., & Loveland, D. (2015). Recovery from addiction from mental illness: Shared and contrasting lessons. In R. Ralph & P. Corrigan (Eds.), Recovery in mental illness: Broadening our understanding of wellness. Washington DC: American Psychological Association. Retrieved from www2.nami.org/. Whitmont, E. (1969). The symbolic quest: Basic concepts of analytical psychology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whitmont, E. (1993). The alchemy of healing: Psyche and soma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Wikman, M. R. (2004). The pregnant darkness. York Beach, ME: Nicholas-­Hayes. Winnicott, D. W. (1967). Mirror-­role of the mother and family in child development. In P. Lomas (Ed.), The predicament of the family: A psycho-­analytical symposium (pp. 26–33). London: Hogarth. Woodman, M. (1984). Body and psyche. New York: Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. Woodman, M. (1985). The pregnant virgin: A process of psychological transformation. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Worringer, W. (1953/2014). Abstraction and empathy: A contribution to the psychology of style. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books. (Reprint of 1953 edition.) Wurmser, L. (1995). The mask of shame. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aaronson. Zhong, F. (2013). George Herms re-­emerges. In W Magazine. Retrieved from www.wmagazine.com/culture/art-­and-design/2013/09/george-­herms-emergio/. 

Index

abstraction in art 49–50 active imagination 53–6, 75, 78 affect theory 18–27 Ainsworth, Mary 99 alchemy 24, 59; mortification 24; petrification 34–5 archetypal psychology 13–14, 17, 71–2, 84 archetype 17, 20, 34, 54; Dionysian 41, 80–4; Feminine 20–1, 34, 119 art making 16, 34, 39–40, 53, 56–8, 61, 89, 93, 96–102, 110–19 art therapy 52, 55–6, 88, 96 assemblage art 41–50, 56–8, 100–17 autonomic nervous system 31 autonomous psyche 13, 41, 66, 72, 74 Bastian, Brock 36 Berman, Walter 46–7 Bradshaw, John 27–30, 35, 52 Broucek, Francis 18, 23, 34–8 Buddhism 50, 53, 106 burlesque 80–5 collage 43–4, 46, 96, 102, 108 collective unconscious 13–15, 47, 52, 74–5 complex (Jungian) 13, 37–9, 55 Cornell, Joseph 45–6 creativity 34, 38–41, 52, 54–6, 62, 69, 71 de Chirico, Giorgio 59 deconstruction 36, 91, 93, 100–1, 117 depth psychology 13–14, 16–18, 20, 33, 51–3, 72, 85, 117 dissociation see splitting Duchamp, Marcel 43–7

dream 12, 51–3, 71, 75, 113 dysregulation 31 Edinger, Edward 24 enantiodromia 66 embodied curriculum 15 embodiment 37, 52, 56, 81, 84, 89, 98–9 empathetic art 49–50 empathy 27, 52, 62 Erickson, Erik 29–30 esthetic animation 48–9 found objects 13–14, 44, 46, 57–8, 100, 113 Freud, Sigmund 21, 30, 35, 45, 52–3, 70 Fromm, Erich 68–9 gaze: objectifying 34–5, 83; still-face 34 gender 20–1 Greek mythology 19, 71, 80–1, 84 guilt 19, 25–7, 36, 38–9, 64, 66, 76, 86, 98, 104 healing 19, 23, 27, 32–3, 51–60, 116 healthy shame 27–8 heuristic study 14–16, 45, 61, 70, 96, 116–19 Herms, George 46–7 Hillman, James 13, 48, 72, 118 Husserl, Edmund 14 Hutcheson, Francis 28 hyperarousal 31 hypoarousal 31 idolatry 40–1 incarnation 20, 40, 47, 101

Index   129 Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) 14–17, 80, 93–6 Jacoby, Mario 18 Jaffe, Aniela 38, 44, 47, 55, 58–9 Johnson, Robert 23 Judeo-Christianity 19, 28, 40–1, 50, 79, 84, 118; Adam 20–1; Eve 20–1; Genesis 20; Lilith 20 Jung, Carl 13, 21, 37–8, 47–50, 53–9, 66–71, 74, 118 Kalsched, Donald 38 Kandinsky, Wassily 48 Kaufman, Gershen 18, 20–5, 34, 37–9, 51, 56 Kerenyi, Carl 84 Kienholz, Edward 46–7 Lewis, Helen Block 18, 22–5, 51 Lewis, Michael 18 Libido 53 Lipps, Theodore 49 Locke, John 26–7 madness 55, 71, 81, 84 masculine shame: patriarchy 20 masochism 99 mask 35–6, 80 May, Rollo 41 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14 Metz 44 modern art 42–7, 59; dada 43–6; surrealism 43–6 Morrison, Andrew 24 morality 19, 23–8, 36, 40, 50, 63, 76, 81, 83 Moustakas, Clark 15–16, 61, 70, 75, 85, 87, 89, 93, 117 Moustakas’ phases of inquiry 61; initial engagement 70–4; immersion 75–85; incubation 85–7; illumination and explication 87–9; creative synthesis 89–93; validation 93–5 multiplicity 37, 64–5, 71, 80, 84, 92 narcissism 54, 78–9 Nathanson, Donald 29 Neumann, Erich 34, 55, 58 Nietzsche, Friedrich 84 neuroception 32 neuroscience 19, 30 neurosis 37, 51, 53, 67, 116

noticing 57–8 objectification 35–6, 49, 83; selfobjectification 34–6, 49 objective psyche see collective unconscious outsider art 47–8, 97 parasympathetic nervous system 31 perfectionism 28, 34–5, 38–9, 50, 56, 71, 78, 80, 86–8, 91, 95–100, 119 Perera, Sylvia 35, 39, 53–4, 57 personal unconscious 13, 55, 75 personality disorder 19, 62, 64–5 personify 13, 20, 53, 65 Picasso, Pablo 43 phenomenology 13–17, 23, 25, 80, 93, 96 play 34, 39, 46, 52, 54, 58, 89, 98–101, 117 polytheism 40–1 polyvagal theory 31–2 Porges, Stephan 31–2, 116 Psychoanalysis 51 psychobiology 18, 30–3, 98 psychosis 54, 118 psychosocial development 29–30 psychotherapy 51–3, 61–2, 96, 118 Rauschenberg, Robert 45–7 ‘Red Book, The’ 38, 55, 67, 71, 118 sadomasochism 93 Sartre, Jean-Paul 35 self-conscious emotions 23–5 self-expression 16, 27, 33–4, 38, 58, 61, 63, 76, 81, 96, 111, 116 self-punishment 36, 62, 99 sexuality 19, 36, 40–1, 80, 84 Schwitters, Kurt 43–7, 58–9 Schore, Allan 31, 34 Seaford, Richard 11, 41 secondary shame 23 Seitz, William 42–5, 58 shadow 17, 38–9, 53–9, 66, 70, 74, 80, 83, 85 Shultz, James 23–4, 29 social engagement system 32, 116 social self-preservation theory 32 Spielrein, Sabina 21 splitting 34, 37–8, 62, 64, 98 Staples, Lawrence 37–9, 47, 51, 53, 56–7, 60

130   Index Stoicism 28–9 Stolorow, Robert 23, 35 subjective psyche see personal unconscious Tangney, June 19, 24–6, 33 Tomkins, Silvan 18, 20–5, 29 toxic shame 27 trauma 19, 63–5 Ulanov, Ann 38, 55

Underland-Rosow, Vicky 18, 27–8 van der Kolk, Bessel 19, 30 Victorian 75, 81, 88 von Franz, Marie-Louis 53–4, 58–9 Whitmont, Edward 41, 53–4, 57 Winnicott, Donald 34–5 Woodman, Marion 38, 59 Worringer, Wilhelm 49–50 Wurmser, Léon 54