ABSTRACT
In an author's experience, the psychotherapeutic setting itself can cause certain reactions of shame. In Jungian practice, where Freud's basic rule was modified, and the psychoanalytic couch replaced with a face-to-face setting, the focus is on understanding the conscious and unconscious situation; an attempt is made to offer the analysand a protected space in which feelings of anxiety and shame become completely unnecessary. Feelings of shame about one's sexuality may affect both client and analyst, leading them to use symbolic interpretations as a way of avoiding painful and awkward issues. The shame-anxiety of having to face the world as a pitiful wallflower is not unrelated to the psychic wounding that is responsible for one's unchosen state of singleness. The author describes an intra-psychic pattern that may lie beneath the shame-anxiety associated with being lonely and single. Even in the age of feminism and greater recognition of professional and single women, the old values still retain their power, consciously or unconsciously.
