On Shame and the Search for Identity

This is a book by Helen Merrell Lynd, published in 1958. It’s old, but it’s really good in a lot of ways.

The best stuff comes at the beginning and end of the book, where Lynd lets fly with a range of inspiring and nuanced observations about the human condition. I say inspiring because her interlocutors are existentialists and Freudians who, perhaps riding some of the despair provoked by the second world war, believe that humans are anti-social, full of repression, and who must “accommodate” themselves to the world, though harboring deep desires toward control, equilibrium, and narcissism. So, Lynd comes smashing in reminding us, and the her audience, that the opposite is true. That humans grow and mature because they become curious about the world, interested in various projects, and in love and friendship with others. That humans develops their own autonomous ways of integrating and appreciating the world and its values, even if the world is a bleak and corrupted place that demands conformity or acquiescence.

The themes are so widely humanistic that it’s hard to say why the book is about shame. I mean, there are connections, but it’s quite a task to see why Lynd is concerned, basically, to show us why we need shame in our lives and that it can be profoundly good. Her idea is that shame is a moment in which we perceives ourselves as suddenly out of sync with our fellow persons and that these feelings may lead us to new ways of interacting with the world. She also distinguished guilt and shame as well as gives a number of interesting, literary and real life examples of shame. She wisely discusses second shame, such as the way that teenagers just seem to be ashamed of their parents all the time. Exactly why is a hard and deep question.

The middle of the book I found somewhat boring in that Lynd is wading into the psychoanalysis literature of her day, which is, if her quotations are to be believed, badly in need of an intellectual reckoning. Some of the stuff she lists out is really pretty ridiculous. She engages it with so meticulously though. I almost wish she had sat down to write her book 50 years later when the criticisms and points she is laboring over are much more accepted and internalized — she would have been free to really explore some of themes she is identifying.

Another latent, interesting thing is that she is a professor at Sarah Lawrence, which was, I believe an all-female university at the time of the publication of this book. I wonder how hostile Lynd found academia to her writings because she was a woman (and presumably sought refuge at a place that accepted women like Sarah Lawrence). At times she is writing with such passion that I wonder if she was used to having to be “twice as good” at her scholarship to get any air time. These are just thoughts, I am not sure if there is any truth to them — I didn’t research her life.

A pithy part of the book:

“Common humanity and individual uniqueness are not, I believe, Platonic opposites, as Sullivan suggests, but Hegelian opposites, in the sense that each is part of and necessary to the other.” (235) Well put, a nice way to a capture a distinction.