The Ordeal of Civility

The Guilt of Shame

A step in the analysis at this point ought to be spelled out more explicitly. In finding the origin of the Oedipus complex theory in an incident of Gentile insolence told to the young Freud years earlier, and in the son’s embarrassment at his father’s shameful response to this challenge, I am proposing not a “reflection” theory of the origin of the Oedipal theory—namely, that a psychological theory of Freud mechanically “reflects” a sociological incident of his life (and of his father’s life)—but a dynamic theory: I propose that the psychoanalytic theory of the person is itself an active, unconscious suppression (by Freud) of sociobiographical fact, and that this suppressed social shame “returns” in the more legitimate and (for Freud) more tolerable admission of moral guilt spelled out in the Oedipal theory.

Peter L. Berger, in a brilliant account of sociological “conversions,” speaks of “massive social mobility” itself as involving, on the part of the children, a kind of “moral parricide” of the father, a kind of symbolic murder of the parent in “a sacrificial ritual of the mind.” If there is, as he writes, “an embarrassing former self, long left behind,” there is perhaps an even more embarrassing “former” parent also left behind. “It is no wonder, incidentally,” he adds, “that the Freudian mythology of parricide has found ready credence in American society and especially in those recently middle-class segments of it” in whose lives massive social mobility has been so conspicuous.¹ If it is understandable how the socially mobile would give ready credence to the “Freudian mythology of parricide’—allowing it, in the sociology-of-knowledge sense, to pass for knowledge—how much more understandable it is that the socially and culturally mobile Freud should have given credence to the Oedipus mythos of Sophocles, finding it so inwardly convincing that he was helpless to resist taking it for knowledge, thus transforming Sophocles’ tragedy into a cognitive theory of psychosexual development and sending it out into the world as psychoanalytical”science." If moves up the social ladder can be experienced as parricidal betrayal, they will be doubly so experienced if they coincide—as they do in the Jewish case—with moves across the cultural divide.

It is my contention, based on the texts, that Freud was ashamed of his father’s behavior. I further contend that he felt guilt for being thus ashamed—what I call the “guilt of shame.” Guilt has been studied from every side, and shame has recently come in for its share of attention.² But nothing has been done, so far as I know, on the “guilt of shame.” This is a highly specific experience, especially germane to the experience of members of acculturating and assimilating subcultures. It is an affect sui generis and phenomenologically irreducible to either guilt or shame. It is the. “subjective” social psychological correlate of the “objective” sociological occurrences of social mobility, modernization, “alternation,” and assimilation, especially as these forces are experienced by “ethnics.”

We experience guilt, usually, when we violate some value that we hold, when we go (actively) against what our conscience “tells” us: we break a promise, tell a lie, “cheat” on an exam or on our wives, betray a friend. Shame, on the other hand, is involuntary: we “find” ourselves embarrassed and ashamed (of ourselves, or of people with whom we are ascriptively identified: parents, marital partners, our own children, fellow nationals or ethnics, etc.). Shame is a “condition” rather than an action. Shame may be about something specific (e.g., after the class period is over, the teacher suddenly discovers that his trouser fly had been unzipped all the time), but the affect itself is general, it “suffuses” one’s whole being: one is embarrassed. (Nothing had been done intentionally; at best, something had been left undone—e.g., unzipped.) A specific, guilty deed is, in a sense, alterable, forgiveable, retractable. Shame echoes and reechoes long after the event. Shame is an exposure, not a deed.

The next step in this argument is: to be ashamed of another or for another—such as a parent—is an even more shattering experience than to be ashamed of or for yourself. “Because of the pervasive and specifically unalterable character of experiences of shame,” Helen Lynd writes, “shame for one’s parents can pierce deeper than shame for oneself…. No matter how disgusted I am with myself, in some respects I can perhaps change. But the fact that these are my parents … is unchangeable. ‘Shame in a kindred cannot be avoided,’ says a seventeenth century proverb.”³ I look on Freud’s shame as an example of what Miss Lynd calls “the special character of shame felt by children for their parents.”⁴

But filial shame takes a further dimension when it is the embarrassment of the child who has “passed beyond” the parent socially and, especially, culturally. Jewish Emancipation supplied an “ideal” matrix for such experiences: “For a child of immigrant parents there is often acute conflict between the desire to look up to his parents and the shame he experiences for the exposure of their different ways and their uncertainty and unseemliness in a strange land.”⁵ The ignominious obsequiousness of Freud’s father was, for the son, just such an exposure experience. Helen Lynd speaks of “the widely felt, if not widely acknowledged, shame of children who become aware that their parents are not secure or at home in their social environment,” giving as one of her examples of the object of this filial shame, “deference toward other persons on the part of parents, their not ‘knowing what to do’ in a situation that calls for competence, their smiling acquiescence in the place of strength’—their ignominious acquiescence, we might add, in place of the courage the child would have wished them to have displayed. Such shamefully submissive ineptitude”may arouse in their children pity or protectiveness when they want to give respect—a feeling hard to acknowledge and hard to bear."⁶

Why is this specific experience “not widely acknowledged…,” “hard to acknowledge” compared to confessions of guilt, and, even when acknowledged, “hard to bear”? (The whole thrust of Lynd’s book is to urge “confrontation” with shame, rather than with guilt, as the uniquely necessary “spiritual exercise” for the achieving of modern identity. She opposes this Eriksonian “discipline” of shame to the Freudian “working through” of guilt.) The answer is, that for the son to own up to shame for the parent, rather than to his parent’s guilt, is to admit to parental inferiority rather than to his own wrongdoing. The latter is an admission about his own person; to admit the former is to “consent” to parental inferiority in the eyes of others (in this case, the general Gentile culture ).⁷ The guilt of wrongdoing is easier to face than the shame of inferiority, especially when seen in a parent. Guilt, we all know, is remediable; meaningful change is possible through subsequent acts of the guilty party: repentance, restitution, or forgiveness in the moral order, apology in the social order. But the experience of “being ashamed” collides with the opaque facticity of “all those others” who cannot be changed in their appraisal of—in this case—the parental inferiority (except by revolution: Marx).

But—and this is the crucial step—precisely because the parent is blameless (morally), we feel ourselves guilty for feeling ashamed of him, since it is we who have freely chosen “these others” as the new reference group in terms of which the parent now appears vulgar to us. Our leaving the orbit of the parental subculture is experienced as a free act (“assimilation”). The distance we thereby put between our parents and ourselves is the very freely chosen condition without which we would not have winced in shame of them in the first place. So, paradoxically, it is we who are guilty for achieving those things—social mobility, refinement, assimilation—in virtue of which we experience our Own parents as embarrassing and distasteful to us. To have remained within the primitive togetherness of the parental subculture of our origin would have immunized us against being ashamed of it. Alternatively, to experience shame of that subculture is to admit the guilt of having moved “beyond” it and so “betrayed” it. This is the “guilt of shame”: secretly, we know that we are responsible for being ashamed, not the parents for being shameful (or shameless). Their appearing vulgar to us is the price we must pay for becoming refined. Cultural conversion changes a person’s taste. There is an inexorable logic of taste involved in the modernization process not unlike the logic of fate inherent in Greek tragedy. A cultural convert will often rue his first, small, “blind” steps in a process that leads in the end, one of them writes,⁸ to “a distaste for the surroundings in which I was bred and ultimately (God forgive me) even for many of the people I loved, and so [to] a new taste for other kinds of people…. All this was inexorably entailed in the logic of a taste for the poetry of Keats and the painting of Cézanne and the music of Mozart.”⁹

If all of this makes sense, it will be apparent why we are anxious to hurry the initial shame experience into an admission of guilt. We move from the initial affect of shame—which is intolerable, relatively—to the meta-affect of “guilt about our shame.” Writing of George Eliot’s character Dorothea in Middlemarch, Helen Lynd notes her “eagerness to exaggerate her own guilt rather than to admit [in shame] inadequacy in the possibilities of love or loss of faith in the people and the world she had trusted.”¹⁰ Shame—like envy—is a sociological affect par excellence.¹¹ It is deeply entwined with experiences of meaninglessness and anomie, with the brute givenness of social evil. Traditional theodicy can handle moral evil—guilt—relatively easily. But certain cultural evils, irreversible maldistributions of specifically sociocultural values—the relative superiority-inferiority of the deference and prestige dimensions of stratification and the irreversibility of history (e.g., “We got here first and set up the rules”)—have only revolutionary “solutions” for the deep kind of woes they set going in people. Otherwise, only shame answers to their facticity. “Sin, guilt, punishment—each is, in one sense, an affirmation of order and significance. Shame questions the reality of any significance”¹² because it obscurely intuits the irreversible arbitrariness of the conditions that generate it. That is why political revolution achieves its deepest and most secret ambition in the rewriting of history itself.

With this as background, we can return to Freud. The “parricide” Freud committed was committed by Freud’s shame of him. The opposite of shame is courage. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex Freud sees passive shame reenacted as courage. “Courage,” Lynd writes, “is the counterpart of shame.”¹³ Oedipus Rex enables Freud vicariously to convert passive shame into active courage, avenging himself and his father against both his father and the general culture. Oedipus Rex, in fantasy, “solves” many of Freud’s “problems.” But everything begins in the shame experience.

The two traits of the sociocultural infrastructure of this shame—which structure constitutes its sociological sine qua non—are its arbitrariness and its (historicotemporal) irreversibility. So Freud mutates the shame into guilt, since it is more tolerable because more alterable to want to kill your father than to be ashamed of him. (And, besides, Freud in fact does experience guilt as part of the complex emotional “complex” he suffers, but it is the “guilt of shame,” the guilt of having “deauthorized” the parent, not the guilt of having entertained the forbidden wish to kill him in order to possess the mother.) It is more permissible and tolerable to own up, to blame yourself for being a parricide (in fantasy), than to be ashamed of your father (in reality) for his, and consequently your, misfortune in having been born a Jew. So Freud converts the sharhe into guilt. He transforms the sociohistorical “givenness” of Judaism into the psychomoral “takenness” of Jewishness. From a misfortune it becomes a problem. From historical tragedy it becomes a solvable scientific problem. “After some experiences of shame,” Helen Lynd writes, “we may welcome guilt as a friend.”¹⁴

Finally, what about the “positive” component in the Oedipus complex theory, the sociocultural core of the lust for the mother which sets the whole thing going? Is this forbidden “lust-for-the-mother” aspect of Freud’s Oedipus complex (its manifest content as culturally tabooed as the “guilt-at-desiring-the-death-of-the-father” aspect) nevertheless Freud’s “scientific” veneer for a latent wish—desire for the Gentile girl (the shiksa¹⁵)—that, subculturally, is perhaps even more forbidden? I undertake, briefly, in answer, the following socioanalysis. Leslie Fiedler in “The Jew in the American Novel” analyzes the “Zion as Eros” theme that surfaced in the American Jewish novel from Abraham Cahan’s Rise of David Levinsky (1917) to Ludwig Lewisohn’s Don Juan (1923) and Ben Hecht’s A Jew in Love (1931). “It is in the role of passionate lover that the American-Jewish novelist sees himself,” Fiedler writes, “at the moment of his entry into American literature”—as Heine had seen himself in the early second generation of Jewish Emancipation in Europe—“and the community with which he seeks to unite himself he sees as the shiksa.”¹⁶ By Freud’s time, at the end of the century, all the strands in the importunate “wish” behind Jewish Emancipation had faltered or failed: Rahel Varnhagen’s social emancipation, Marx’s “species” emancipation, Heine’s literary-erotic emancipation—all were seen as illusory utopias. Freud codified this failure in his theory of the problematics of social and sexual intercourse with the shiksa as Gentile community. But in Freud, Abraham Cahan’s view (as Fiedler puts it with regard to David Levinsky) “of ghetto Judaism as a castrating force”¹⁷ is internalized and psychologized as the castrating father. In Freud the deepest taboo of Judaism, the taboo against intermarriage, the forbidden lust of the Jew for the Gentile shiksa, for the shiksa as “the promise of fulfillment,”¹⁸ is rationalized, psychologized, and reinterpreted as the desire for the mother, which desire is held taboo by everyone, of course, not just by Jews. The particularist ritual taboo of the Jewish subculture—intermarriage, connubium—is reconceptualized (and psychologized) as the universalist, “scientific,” anthropological taboo on incest. Another of the tantalizing lures of Jewish Emancipation is thus put to rest in the name of universalist science. Freud, in his ambivalence, could, by means of this conceptual stratagem, remain a Jew and, at the same time, not a Jew. In this way, “being a Jew could develop from a politico-social circumstance into a personal, individual problem”¹⁹ (my emphasis), as well as into a universal fate. Thus did Freud seek “hiddenly” to transform a misfortune of history into a universalist science of man. The "Jewish problem’—the ancient Judenfrage—had been kicked upstairs.