ABSTRACT
No less characteristic of the civilizing process…is the development of that peculiar complex of emotions that we call ‘shame’ or ‘embarrassment’…The feeling of shame is a specific response, a type of anxiety which is developed in the individual by habit and which is automatically reproduced on certain occasions. It takes on its peculiar colouration from the fact that the person feeling it has done or is about to do something as a consequence of which he comes into conflict with people to whom he is linked in one or other manner, as well as with himself, with that part of his consciousness to which he concedes moral authority. The feeling of shame-fear is not merely the product of a conflict between the individual and the prevailing social opinion: it is rather the outcome of a clash resulting when an individual’s behaviour has brought him into collision with that part of himself which reflects this social opinion. It is a conflict with his own personality: he recognises himself as having fallen in his own self-esteem. What he fears is the loss of the respect of others to which he attaches value.
