Shame, guilt, and violence

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by James Gilligan

These observations, and many others like them, convinced me that the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation--a feeling that is painful and can even be intolerable and overwhelming--and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride. I will use these two tellers--shame and pride--as generic terms to refer to two whole families of feelings, in the same way that we use the term "flower" as a generic term to refer to a wide variety of different but related plants--roses and daffodils, for example. I have already mentioned several synonyms for pride, to which I could add the feeling of dignity, and the sense of having maintained one's honor intact. But pride must be in much shorter supply than shame, because there are literally dozens of synonyms for the latter feeling, a partial listing of which would include feelings of being slighted, insulted, disrespected, dishonored, disgraced, disdained, demeaned, slandered, treated with contempt, ridiculed, teased, taunted, mocked, rejected, defeated, subjected to indignity or ignominy; feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, incompetence; feelings of being weak, ugly, ignorant, or poor; of being a failure, "losing face," and being treated as if you were insignificant, unimportant, or worthless, or any of the numerous other forms of what psychoanalysts call "narcissistic injuries." Envy and jealousy are members of this same family of feelings: people feel inferior to those whom they envy, or of whom they are jealous, with respect to whatever it is they feel envious or jealous about.

When people suffer an indignity, they become indignant (and may become violent); our language itself reveals the link between shame and rage. In an earlier publication (Gilligan, 1996), I spoke of shame as the pathogen that causes violence just as specifically as the tubercle bacillus causes tuberculosis, except that in the case of violence it is an emotion, not a microbe--the emotion of shame and humiliation. It is because this emotion is so powerful and pervasive, and so central to the experience of many people, especially those who are predisposed to violence, that there are so many synonyms for it, just as the Inuit were reputed to have 40 words for snow because of its centrality in their culture and experience.

When I first realized what I was hearing from the violent men I was working with, I began to think that I had discovered something original--something previously unknown. Then I happened to reread a passage in the Bible, the story of the first recorded murder in Western history. It was a story that I had read many times before without ever feeling that I understood why Cain killed Abel. But after having the experience for the first time in my life of sitting down and talking with people who had actually committed murders, and asking them why they had, I was at last able to "hear" what the story of Cain and Abel was saying. And I had to admit to myself that the Bible had arrived at the same psychological insight I had, but a long time earlier. For the Bible makes it very clear why Cain killed Abel: "The Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain ... he had not respect." In other words, God "dis'ed" Cain! Or rather, Cain was "dis'ed" because of Abel--and he acted out his anger over this insult in exactly the same way as the murderers I was working with.