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[ Last updated, Sat, Jan 17, 2004 ]
Gestalt!
ISSN 1091-1766
Volume 8 ; Number1
Winter, 2004
Published by
Gestalt GlobalCorporation
Indexes for Gestalt!
Dimensions of Dialogue | Call for Proposals, AAGT 7th International Conference for Gestalt Therapy | PTSD and Gestalt Therapy - A Literature Review | Perceiving You Perceiving Me: Self-Conscious Emotions in Gestalt Therapy | Report on the GISC Invitational Research Conference | Creative Ground
Gstalt-L, An email discussion group devoted to Gestalt therapy and the community of its practitioners (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-l). Gstalt-J, An email discussion group devoted to research on Gestalt therapy, theory and practice (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-j). Supported by the Gestalt Research Consortium (GRC) (www.g-gej.org/grc). Gestalt Bookmarks, a place to begin researching the field of contemporary Gestalt therapy on the world wide web (www.g-gej.org/gestaltbookmarks).
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Introduction
For several recent years Gestalt therapy practitioners have contemplated shame and its effects (Lee & Wheeler, 1996; Wheeler, 1997; Resnick, 1997; Greenberg and Paivio, 1997, Fuhr and Fuhr, 1997; Gillie, 2000). Journals have devoted whole issues to the subject, with some writers seeing shame as a central organizing construct but others regarding attempts to make it so to be unecessary. In spending this effort to parse a particular, they have missed the larger picture. Shame is but one of the class of emotions known as "self-conscious emotions." In missing this larger perspective, more interesting applications of the dynamics of self-consicous emotions have been lost as well.
This article is an attempt to reclaim significant ground for understanding shame, to see it in its proper context as one of an associated group of emotions, and to stimulate discussion of that larger gestalt.
Any given week at a local dual-diagnosis hospital therapists can be seen talking with clients about relapse. Routinely they speak about what they call “The Relapse Cycle.” It’s a way of describing a familiar chain of events that surrounds the stumbling out of sobriety into intoxication. At the top of the relapse cycle a person is working his/her program, and at the bottom, he or she has relapsed; in between ensues a series of intense feelings and thinking errors. The emotional experiences are often associated with a self-appraisal of loathing, self justification, or a choice to escape. Variants of this same cycle have been observed among sex offenders, and, while most treatment approaches seek to intervene at the point where thinking errors open the gate to self-medication or re-offending, it would seem more fruitful to pay attention to the engine driving this process: self-conscious emotions.
Self-conscious emotions is a construct and an affective set. As an affective set, it forms a logical grouping of emotions. As a construct, it offers a way of bringing together related phenomena and a handle on emotional experience that can facilitate case conceptualization and therapeutic process.
To comprehend how shame is just one aspect of a larger construct and to begin utilizing that construct in clincical practice, it is necessary to understand what self-conscious emotions are, how they influence relationship, and how they relate to creative adjustment in one's interpersonal field.
Definitions and Context
There are multiple theories and approaches to the study of emotions; for the purposes of this discussion, the conceptualization of Richard Lazarus has been accepted as providing a generalized background for an explanation of self-conscious emotions. Even though Lazarus and Robert Zajonc disagreed over the issue of cognitive attribution in the generation of emotional experience, with Zajonc advocating the independence of affect (Zajonc, 2000), it is evident that some kind of attribution is involved in emotional experience (Blascovich & Mendes, 2000), which likely includes emotional memory (LeDoux, 1996). Whether a cognitive or affective appraisal, both assess the environment with regard to oneself and likely include both episodic and semantic memory (Markowitsch, 2003). The dual processing of these influences is most likely, but with regard to self-conscious emotions the heuristic value in Lazarus is helpful. He suggested five points, as outlined below:
- The theory is systemic. Emotional process involves an organized configuration of many variables; no single variable is sufficient to explain the emotional outcome, and all variables are interdependent.
- Emotions express two interdependent principles: one, the process principle, referring to flux or change; the other, the structure principle, referring to the idea that there are stable person-environment relationships that result in recurrent emotional patterns in the same individual.
- The biological and social variables that influence the emotions develop and change from birth, especially in the early years of life but perhaps also in later life. This is called the developmental principle; it also implies that the emotion process is not the same at all stages of life.
- The emotion process is distinctive for each individual emotion.
- The key substantive theme of the theory is the relational meaning principle. This principle states that each emotion is defined by a unique and specifiable relational meaning. This meaning is expressed in a core relational theme for each individual emotion, which summarizes the personal harms and benefits residing in each person-environment relationship. The emotional meaning of these person-environment relationships is constructed by the process of appraisal, which is the central construct of the theory. The appraisal process involves a set of decision-making components, as it were, which create evaluative patterns that differentiate among each of the emotions; three primary appraisals, which concern the motivational stakes in an adaptational encounter; and three secondary appraisals, which have to do with the options for coping and expectations. The primary appraisal components are goal relevance, goal congruency or incongruency, and type of ego-involvement. The secondary appraisal components are blame or credit, coping potential, and future expectations. (Lazarus, 1991, p. 39)
Lazarus's first point about systems corresponds to a Gestalt therapist's concepts of holism and field dynamics. His second point relates to the process of figure formation, a series of figures forming against backgrounds, and especially the residue of experience and familiar gestalts in one's ground. His third point relates to the developmental field and to the relationship between person and environment, including action at the boundary of contact. Lazarus' fifth point relates to adaptation, or the Gestalt therapy construct of creative adjustment in the face of an interpretation of experience. Although he proposes a fixed taxonomy, as opposed to a fluid process of meaning-making distinct to each person-environment situation, the main point is worth keeping, and that has to do with the interpretation, or appraisal of experience which forms in the person. It is decisively phenomenological.
In phenomenology a person is conscious of both concrete specifics and the various meanings to which they belong. For example, they may see a variety of apricots but understand the meaning of "apricotness," or even a larger category of meaning such as "fruit." A person's experience is also about something, and that something can be real (as another person in one's environmental context), imaginary (as in a dream, a projection, or an interpretation), or conceptual (as in an intellectual construct utilized in one's life - such as "justice"). Consciousness can also be directed toward itself, as when one becomes cognizant of one's own emotions, thoughts, desires, and other forms of aware experience. (Hein & Austin, 2001)
Building on these phenomenological characteristics, Barret states that in self-conscious experience appraisal "... is not about the world or the self; it captures the personal significance of the environment for the self.” (1995, p.36). This can be understood as a reference to the "between," something familiar to Gestalt therapists as the functioning of the boundary. Providing an illustration of how self-conscious emotions function, the following table (building on Barrett's work) summarizes principles in the development of shame and guilt, two examples of self-conscious emotions:
Table One: Shame & Guilt Compared and Contrasted
| Principle 1: Self-conscious emotions are social in nature. |
Shame and guilt are (a) socially constructed, (b) invariably connected with (real or imagined) social interaction, (c) endowed with significance by social communication and/or relevance to desired ends and (d) associated with appraisals regarding others as well as the self. |
| Principle 2: Self-conscious emotions serve intrapersonal-interpersonal and behavior-regulatory functions for the individual. |
Shame organizes different transactions between individuals and the environment than guilt. For example, shame functions to distance the individual from the social environment, while guilt functions to motivate reparative action. |
| Principle 3: Appraisals are intimately connected to the functions self-conscious emotions serve. |
They interpret the nature of the relationship between self and other. |
| Principle 4: Self-conscious emotions are associated with action tendencies. |
Action tendencies make sense given the appraisals and functions associated with these emotions. Shame is associated with withdrawal from social contact; guilt is associated with outward movement, aimed at reparation for a wrongdoing. |
| Principle 5: Self-conscious emotions contribute to the development of self. |
They do this by highlighting the kind of behaviors a person can (or cannot) and does (or does not) do in any given social setting, whether actual or imagined. Such experiences signify how a person imagines others view his or her behavior, which contributes to how one evaluates him or herself. |
Other writers have taken a slightly different direction in their exploration of self-conscious emotions. Building on his investigations into emotional development and cognition in children, Michael Lewis states, “A unique aspect of some self systems is objective self-awareness. By objective self-awareness I mean the capacity of a self to know it knows or to remember it remembers.” (1991, p. 232) What Lewis means is a shift from experiencing oneself subjectively to experiencing oneself objectively, as being part of what can be observed. This is movement from direct and immediate raw experience, which is centered in the first person perspective, purposeful, and identified with its figure, to experience which is observant of oneself - in which recognition is coupled with raw experience and allows one to witness the subjective center in which such experience is made meaningful. Helen Block Lewis says that shame and guilt, for example, are affective-cognitive signals to the person that its attachment system is threatened (its relationship to others in the context), and that both these emotions push the individual toward repairing and restoring its relational bonds. (Lewis, H., 1989). It is at the base of Wertheimer’s question if the functioning of the self might be governed by its relationship to the field in which it operates. (ibid). Indeed, this seems to be at the core of Philippson's (2001) assertion that the self emerges from all the various contacts at the boundary. This idea of an emergent self is corroborated by neurological research, establishing multiple streams of consiousness (O'Brien & Opie, 2003), all processed and organized in the right, pre-frontal cortex (Gallup, Jr., Anderson, Platek). With information radiating from various motor, proprioceptive, memory, and limbic regions, "self" emerges at this executive center of the brain (Goldberg, 2001), coordinating the subjective sense conveyed in the first personal pronoun, "I," and identifying the sense of personal agency as the one responsible for one's experience.
Some people think of the self as the essence or content of a mental state; others are more concerned with how people see themselves, and so they tend to see the self in terms of roles people play in society. In cognitive science, the self is set in terms of how the mind works and is often investigated using computer simulations. Neuroscience correlates mental phenomena with brain states and structures using technology to track activity in the brain. In clinical work people are concerned with the psychopathology of the self. However, in a very basic way, a person knows they are the same over time, the author of their thoughts and actions, and they are distinct from the environment. The "self" is "the immediate, pervasive, automatic feeling of being a whole person, different from others, constant over time, with a physical boundary, the centre of all our experience." (Kircher and David, 2003, p. 2)
Although denying the use of the term "objective" in the fashion of Michael Lewis, Sylvia Crocker identifies a Gestalt therapy understanding of social self consciousness when she states, "The 'I' which is the subject of all of the human being's experiences is also the organizer of these into a meaningful whole which provides the person, whose 'I' it is, with a working understanding of the world and that person's place in it." (Crocker, 1999, p. 175)
Given this, then, one’s self does come under appraisal, as in Barret, Lazarus, and Michael Lewis above. People evaluate the significance of the environmental other, and they also evaluate the functioning of the environmental self, that is oneself as an aspect of the environment.
Indeed, while Barret takes exception to Helen Lewis’s etiology of self-conscious emotions in her discussion of the development of shame and guilt, it would seem that these two writers have captured a “both-and”rather than an “either -or;” that is, self-conscious emotions are generated through the appraisal of the self in social context, in relationship to others. Writing with an analytical, object relations viewpoint, De Rivera sees the synthesis this way:
...the person is conceived as an individual, whereas others are conceptualized as parts of the individual’s environment, that is, as objects apart from the person...However, if we reflect upon this statement we may become aware of its fundamental egotism. It sees other persons as in our environment and neglects that we are in each of theirs. The moment we become aware of each person as an agent in his or her own right, the conceptualization shatters into as many environments as persons, with each person fundamentally alone, and ourselves forced into the position of a third-person observer. (De Rivera, 1989, p.23)
While De Rivera misses the field connectivity that Gestalt and intersubjective psychodynamic therapists recognize (so that no one is actually "alone"), his language is poetic and descriptive of the ironic self-conscious shift that can suddenly occur when people become aware of themselves as part of a social context. This is the recognition inherent in attribution.
Given this relationship, it proves helpful to understand the developmental process by which self-conscious emotions emerge, including the way they differ from other emotions. Michael Lewis states...
... emotions can be classified in relation to the role of the self. The elicitation of fear, joy, disgust, surprise, anger, sadness and interest does not require introspection or self-reference. Therefore, let us consider these emotions as one set. The elicitation of jealousy, envy, empathy, embarrassment, shame, pride, and guilt does require introspection or self-reference. These emotions constitute another set...Thus, I propose that the difference between primary and secondary emotions is that the secondary emotions involve self-reference. Secondary emotions will be referred to as self-conscious emotions...(Lewis, 1992, p. 19-20)
In various publications for an extended period of time Lewis has developed the following schema for understanding the development of self-conscious emotions and their relationship to other emotional entities:
Figure One: Primary and Secondary Emotions
Lewis claims that by the first year of life all primary emotions have emerged. “Even so, it is not until the middle of the second year that the secondary emotions are observed. More elaborate cognitive abilities either are necessary for, or occur prior to, the emergence of this new class of emotions — abilities that appear between the end of the first year and the middle of the second year of life.” (Lewis, 1989, p.146) Most children below eighteen months, for instance, cannot recognize themselves in a mirror, an ability that signals self-identification and a cognitive-developmental capacity allowing a person to think of him or herself independent from an immediate environmental context (Keenan, Wheeler, Ewers, 2003). This ability is the basis for self-conscious emotions, and it can be traced to development of capacity, growth in the right, pre-frontal cortex, which is increasingly seen as the executive, the artist integrating life experience.
Lewis's model is based on a phenomenological and cognitive-attributional view of emotional processing. In this, he considers the self-conscious emotions of the same status as the cognitive-attributional processes themselves. “The cognitions associated with these emotions may serve simply as elicitors of specific emotions in the same way as do other stimuli, such as the social behavior of others, loud noises, or sudden and uncontrolled events...I mean to give emotions the same status as cognitions. Just as cognitions can lead to emotions, emotions can lead to cognitions.” (Lewis, 1993, p. 566)
Relevance to Gestalt Therapy
Difficulties in processing self-conscious emotions have been associated with personality disorders, addictive dynamics, and interruptions to contact. Gestalt therapists have related these to figures of survival and interpersonal success by which individuals "selectively attend to those aspects of the interpersonal field that relate to their deepest interpersonal wishes and fears." (Greenberg, 2002) Indeed, the ability to even sustain being in therapy can be traced to one's ability to support the sense of a social audience which is intrinsic to self-conscious experience. From the perspective of one seasoned Gestalt therapist, such experience "is part of life and everyone has to learn to deal with it in some way or other. I've just found, both in myself as a client and with clients of mine, that communications that result in shame are liable to stop and even reverse the growth process in therapy. Frequently, it even results in the client leaving therapy, when the shame is... 'insupportible.'" (Tobin, 2003) A similar statement could be offered about the impact of pathological pride in narcissism, the destructive jealousy in marital relationships, or the embarrassment of social phobia.
Self-Conscious emotions provides Gestalt therapists with a broader and more comprehensive theory of shame; as a construct, it connects concepts of affect and self with such Gestalt phenomena as field dynamics, interpretation of experience, meaning-making, dialogue, and contact-boundary processes. Self-conscious emotions, as developed in this article, allows for a richer understanding of emotions in general and, specifically, the range of experience encompassing not only shame but also guilt, embarrassment, pride, and jealousy (among others). This way of conceptualizing these emotions helps relate an individual's affective experience to their field. It explains one possible way in which the intepretation of experience bears on one's self support and contact as it speaks to the connection perceived between self and other. Thus, self-conscious emotions provides a useful heuristic facilitating case conceptualization and diagnosis, pertaining directly to issues involving dual diagnosis, intergenerational dysfunction, attribution, and attachment.
Understanding self-conscious emotions enables a Gestalt therapist to expand his or her assimilations in psychotherapy, because the subject spans both affective and cognitive categories - two major, and frequently polarized clinical considerations. Indeed, self-conscious emotions provide a window on how a client sees him or herself in relation to the social system in which they function and to the set of values and goals to which they have committed themselves. Thus, the heuristic provided in self-conscious emotions relates to fixed gestalts encountered among both client and therapist.
This article has been an effort to recommend a larger construct and affective set under which to consider the experience of shame. Perhaps exploring this conceptual ground would give new energy for understanding a range of secondary, but powerful emotional experiences, such as shame, but to extend the discussion into the realms of pride, guilt, and embarrassment. It is hoped that those familiar with established Gestalt therapy theory can make the necessary connections with what is provided in this article to extend the assimilation, considering the way self-conscious emotions relate to the constructs of organism-boundary, self, id, ego, or personality function. Seen in the company of pride, embarrassment, jealousy, and guilt, shame could be discussed in a new fashion and perhaps understood as related to the emergent experience of self.
Resources
- Abi-Hashem, N. (2000) Psychology, time, and culture. American Psychologist, 55(3), p. 342-343
- Barrett, K.C. (1995) “A functionalist approach to shame and guilt”, in Self - conscious emotions, the psychology of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride, (1995), ed. June Price Tangney and Kurt W. Fischer. New York: The Guildford Press.
- Blascovich, J., Mendes, W. (2000) Challenge and threat appraisals: The role of affective cues, in Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed., Joseph Forgas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Crocker, S. (1999) A well-live life: Essays in Gestalt therapy. Cambridge, MA: GIC Press.
- De Rivera, J. (1989) “Choice of emotion and ideal development”, in Emotions in ideal human development, Leanoard Cirillo, Bernard Kaplan, Seymour Wapner, eds. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publihsers.
- Erskine, R. (1995) A Gestalt therapy approach to shame and self-righteousness: Theory and methods. The British Gestalt journal, 4(2)
- Fuhr, R., Fuhr, M-G. (1995) Shame In teaching/learning settings: A Gestalt approach The British Gestalt journal, 4(2).
- -- Shame as a normal and sometimes dysfunctional experience: A response to the articles by Leslie S. Greenberg/Sandra C. Paivio and Gordon Wheeler on shame. Gestalt Review, 1(3).
- Gallup Jr., G., Anderson, J., Platek, S. (2003) Self-awareness, social intelligence, and schizophrenia, in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tilo Kircher and Anthony David. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Gillie, M. (2000) Shame and bulimia - A sickness of the soul. The British Gestalt journal, 9(2).
- Goldberg, E. (2001) The executive brain: Frontal lobes and the civilized mind. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Greenberg, E. (2002) Love, admiration, or safety: A system of Gestalt diagnosis of borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid adaptations that focuses on what Is figure for the client. Gestalt!, 6(3). Available on-line http://www.g-gej.org/6-3/diagnosis.html
- Greenberg, L., Paivio, S. (1997) Varieties of shame experience in psychotherapy. Gestalt Review, 1(3).
- -- Integrating "being" and "doing" in working with shame. Gestalt Review, 1(3).
- Hein, S., Austin. W. (2001) Empirical and hermeneutic approaches to phenomenological research in psychology - a comparison. Psychological Methods. 6(1), p.3-17
- Jacobs, L. (1995) Shame in therapeutic dialogue. The British Gestalt Journal, 4(2).
- Kaufman, G. (1992) Shame, the power of caring. Rochester: Schenkman Books, Inc.
- Kearns, A., Daintry, P. (2000) Shame in the supervisory relationship: Living with the enemy. The British Gestalt journal, 9(1).
- Keenan, J., Wheeler, M., Ewers, M. (2003) The neural correlates of self-awareness and self-recognition, in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tilo Kircher and Anthony David. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Kircher, T., David, A. (2003) Introduction: The self and neuroscience, in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tilo Kircher and Anthony David. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Lazarus, R.S. (1991) Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Lazarus, R.S. & Lazarus, B.N. (1994) Passion & reason, making sense of our emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Lazarus, R.S., Kanner, A.D., Folkman, S. (1980) “Emotions: A cognitive-phenomenological analysis,” in Emotion, theory, research, and experience. vol 1, ed. Robert Plutchik and Henry Kellerman. New York: Academic Press.
- LeDoux, J. (1996) The emotional brain, the mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. N.Y, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster.
- Lewis, H.B., (1989) “Some thoughts on the moral emotions of shame and guilt,” in Emotions in ideal human development, Leanoard Cirillo, Bernard Kaplan, Seymour Wapner, eds. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publihsers
- Lewis, M. (1993) “The emergence of emotions,” Handbook of emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Haviland. New York: The Guilford Press
- Lewis, M. (1993) “Self-conscious emotions: embarrassment, pride, shame, and guilt,” Handbook of emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Haviland. New York: The Guilford Press.
- Lewis, M. (1992) Shame, the exposed self. New York: The Free Press.
- Lewis, M. (1991) “Ways of knowing: Objective self-awareness or consciousness,” Developmental review, 11, p. 231-243.
- Lewis, M., Sullivan, M.W., Stanger, C. and Weiss, M. (1989) “Self development and self-conscious emotions”, Child development, 60, p.145-160.
- Lewis, M. (1989) “What do we mean when we say emotional development?”, in Emotions in ideal human development, Leanoard Cirillo, Bernard Kaplan, Seymour Wapner, eds. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publihsers.
- Markowitsch, H. (2003) Autonoetic consciousness. in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tilo Kircher and Anthony David. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- O'Brien, G., Opie, J. (2003) The multiplicity of consciousness and the emergence of the self, in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tilo Kircher and Anthony David. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Philippson, P. (2001) Self in relation. Highland, HJ: The Gestalt Journal Press, Inc.
- Resnick, R. (1997) The "recursive loop" of shame: An alternate Gestalt therapy viewpoint. Gestalt Review, 1(3).
- Self - conscious emotions, the psychology of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride, (1995), ed. June Price Tangney and Kurt W. Fischer. New York: The Guildford Press.
- Tobin, S. (2003) Personal communication on Gstalt-L, June 21, 2003, @ 3:30 pm.
- Voice of shame: Silence and connection in psychotherapy, ed. Robert G. Lee and Gordon Wheeler. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
- Wheeler, G. (1997) Self and shame: A Gestalt approach. Gestalt Review, 1(3).
- Zajonc, R. (2000) Feeling and thinking: Closing the debate over the independence of affect, in Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, Joseph Forgas (ed). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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