ABSTRACT
Feelings of shame and their dynamic role in human interaction and process are among the most poorly understood of all the emotions and, until quite in recent years anyway, among the least attended to as well, both clinically and in everyday relational life. In a sense this is odd, since all of us know shame only all too well, from personal experiences-that painful sense of exposure, rejection, or inadequacy that can gnaw at us, make us want to hide or disappear from scrutiny when the self we feel and know is suddenly (or chronically) unacceptable, to a world where we want and need desperately to belong and grow. There is something curious, to say the least, in the fact that feelings this intense and acute, this personally disorganizing in the way they can suddenly cut to the bone of our sense of ourselves and our personal worth, have been so overlooked, underestimated, and at times denied, down through most of the past century or so of clinical and psychological study.
