Psychology of Shame

In an increasingly inequitable world, how are we to understand shame today? Silvan Tomkins, a prominent psychologist on affects, understands shame as one of the primary ‘negative affects’ fundamental to selfhood and behavior. Yet, recent scholarship has ignited a renewed engagement with the topic of shame, broadening its conceptualizations and exploring its practical implications for personhood, education, social inequalities, agency and resistance, and diversity. These innovative approaches emerging from psychology and related disciplines (sociology, anthropology, political science, etc.) are considering how shame is experienced on the individual dimension generated through specific material conditions and sensed dynamically relational ways. Influenced by psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, and cultural theory and research, this course will offer an overview of how shame has been studied as a cultural and social phenomenon and an individual experience.

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