IT IS SHAME THAT GUARDS THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

IT IS SHAME THAT GUARDS THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

Quotes from Donald L. NATHANSON in Shame and Pride, Affect, Sex and the Birth of the Self,

 Ed. W.W.Norton & Company, New York. London,1992.

 By linking dyscontrol to shame Erasmus creates or at least requires the separateness, the isolation, the insularity, the invisible wall that now exists between one person and another.

It seems likely that Greek and roman society, at its highest also required affect modulation and also fostered this isolation of one person from another. P.440

(…) Home became the first place where we learned how to live in the world-what to hide and what to show, how much of self to reveal and in what manner. P.448

  SHAME AND PHOTOGRAPHY

 Where shame had created a new culture of privacy, the camera ripped it asunder. Indeed as privacy grew more and more important, and as more and more of our society came to be controlled by forces operating behind closed doors, an intense pressure developed around the seen and the unseen. (…) For most people words are only a poor substitute for seeing. One picture is worth a thousand words when they are your words and my picture. What I see, I can evaluate myself. Words can be used to hide the truth.  We trust what we can see far more than what we read. What you see is what you get.

I believe that photography has done more to change shame than any other force in the history of our society. P.451 (…) we were enable to look privacy at the face.p453

 MOVIES AND AFFECT DYSCONTROL: SHAME CONVERTED TO ANGER AND FEAR TO EXCITEMENT

 Two developmental lines may be discerned. On the one hand, shame continued to increase, conquering more and more territory. During the 19^th century, those who identifies with the ruling classes became proper, prudish, fastidious and pissy. Our code name from this process was taken from its presentation in England during the reign of queen Victoria. There were, nevertheless a Victorian Europe and a Victorian America, lands where the good queen herself did not rule but where social customs was governed by the relation to shame- as- propriety she came to symbolize.(…) The other line of development was ushered by technology, and it ripped an ever-widening hole in the fabric of shame controlled society. Pp449450

Note:

In the movies for instance; “ for the first time in centuries shame and affect dyscontrol have been unlinked and allowed to travel separate paths “P.471

“ The bad guys in the movies are different these days. These are vigilant films in which the climate of horrific and disgusting execution of the villain, rendered as never before permitted on a film, is excused on the basis of Talionic law.  They are designed less to show the moral superiority of the enlightened hero than to demonstrate for the great mass of macho men these new trends in cruelty. What they do to women is more humiliating, more deadly, more violent and more graphically rendered at any time in our history. I do not believe that the economic success of this genre depends a whit on a societal interest in the triumph of good over evil.” P.470

Observation:   We are moving more and more in a culture of explosion, as a huge and growing segment of our society has adopted the macho script ( attack other), within which shame is converted to anger and fear to excitement.

Picture from Mandala Facebook