ABSTRACT
In a recent comprehensive paper, Leon Wurmser (2015) describes the beginning years of what became a half-century of thinking and writing about shame and shame conflicts. “I was startled to find,” he says, “with a few exceptions. . . very little about this affect of shame and these shame conflicts in the psychoanalytic literature of the time. . . Yet, wherever we look there it was, like a will-o’-the-wisp, here and there and everywhere” (p. 1615). During the time ‒ fortunately months, not decades ‒ that I have considered the concept of arrogance while researching this topic, I have often felt a similar dilemma. There are more than a thousand mentions of arrogance in the literature, but most include the word only briefly and in passing, without according it any special importance or differentiation from other descriptors used to characterize a patient. Most frequently, arrogance figures as part of a list meant to illustrate a patient’s narcissistic tendencies, one feature of the defenses such a person deploys against underlying feelings of shame and inferiority.
