Shame, guilt, and violence

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by James Gilligan

If I call this the "death of the self," I am only paraphrasing what these men have told me. And they made it clear that they experienced the death of that fragile, vulnerable psychological construct, the self, as more tormenting than the death of the body could possibly be, with the implication that any act of violence by means of which they could attempt to resurrect their dead serf, and bring it back to life--to become "born again," so to speak, through an act of apocalyptic violence--would be more than worth the sacrifice of their body.

What had caused the death of the self? The word that means overwhelming humiliation, namely, mortification, comes from Latin roots that mean "to make dead" (mortis, dead, and facere, to make)--a psychological truth exemplified by the fact that one after another of the most violent men I have worked with over the years have described to me how they had been humiliated repeatedly throughout their childhoods, verbally, emotionally, and psychologically (taunted, teased, ridiculed, rejected, insulted). They had also been physically humiliated by means of violent physical abuse, sexual abuse, and life-threatening degrees of neglect (such as being starved by their parents, or simply and totally abandoned, as in coming home to find that their parents had absconded from the family's apartment, leaving them behind). And I am far from being alone in noticing this: Frazier (1974), Menninger (1969), and many other psychiatrists who have studied murderers have reported the repeated and overwhelming shame and humiliation in their childhood experiences.

Why is child abuse humiliating and shame-inducing to the child? Because it is the clearest possible way of communicating to the child that the parent does not love him (or her).Just as pride means self-love (and its various synonyms, such as self-esteem, self-respect, or feelings of self-worth), shame means the lack or deficiency of self-love. There are only two possible sources of love for the self from oneself and from others. While the self-esteem of adults who have attained internalized sources of pride can survive the withdrawal of love from others, up to a point, it appears to be difficult if not impossible for a child to gain the capacity for self-love without first having been loved by at least one parent, or parent-substitute. And when the self is not loved, by itself or by another, it dies, just as surely as the body dies without oxygen.

In my experience, the men who had been most rejected and humiliated and abused, and were therefore most lacking in self-love, behaved as if they could not emotionally afford to love others, as if they needed to conserve whatever limited amounts of love they were capable of for themselves. For that reason, and others, it was hardly surprising to find that the most frequently and extremely violent men appeared to be remarkably incapable of love for, or empathy with, other people; after all, how else could they have hurt them with so little inhibition? What was equally striking was the complete lack of feelings of guilt and remorse for the pain and loss they had inflicted on others. It almost seemed as if the more extreme the degree of cruelty and atrocity, the less the feeling of guilt and remorse. Again, this is hardly surprising, in the sense that one would almost have to be lacking in the capacity to feel guilt and remorse about hurting others in order to be capable of hurting them with so little inhibition. And since the capacity to love others appears to be a prerequisite for the capacity to feel guilty about hurting them, the person who is overwhelmed by feelings of shame is incapable both of the feelings of guilt and remorse and of love and empathy that would inhibit most of us from injuring others no matter how egregiously they had insulted us.