ABSTRACT
Dr. Tony Potter discovered that Robert had an invigorating and developmentally advanced childhood. Tony’s anger came in the thought that Robert Meyer psychiatric status had shamed the father, therefore he had to die. It might be argued that the emotional dimension of the psyche most responsible for paranoid phenomena is the emotion of shame. Patients recovering from paranoid conditions may be seen to go through three phases of recovery—recompensation from persecutory psychosis, reconstruction of the psychic agencies, and then a development of the self. The therapist has crossed the first watershed in working with patients beset with persecutory psychoses. Attention to shame is important in gaining the patient’s trust for developing an alliance with psychotic and paranoid patients. Pride, shame, reproach, and admiration are viewed in terms of the praiseworthiness of actions of agents. Potter’s uneasiness with the way that Robert’s father would alternately shame and praise his son.
