ABSTRACT
This chapter’s focus is on the adverse impact of negative stigma on an ordinary person’s way of being-in-the-world, in particular the stigma pressure associated with task performance. Steele and Aronson described how the salience of stigmatized status negatively impacted African American academic performance and aspiration in terms of what they called “stereotype threat.” Stereotype threat is the discomfort targets feel when they are at risk of satisfying a negative stereotype about their group in the eyes of others, in their own eyes, or both simultaneously. While Steele emphasizes the situational identity contingencies (the totality of circumstances one has to cope with), the cues that intimate them, and the narratives that interpret them, psychoanalysts tend to view identity and stereotype threat as emanating from an internal psychological condition, such as a narcissistic vulnerability. If narcissistic vulnerability makes one susceptible to feeling debilitating humiliation, shame and guilt, and being stigma-afflicted radically disrupts self-esteem and identity, then strongly felt, flexibly and creatively applied, transcendent-pointing moral beliefs and values can fend off stigmatizing affliction and stereotype threat by sheltering a target in a narrative of self-identity that affirms their autonomy, integration and humanity.
