ABSTRACT

This chapter provides selected unpalatable thoughts on shame, envy and hate in organisations and institutional cultures. It discusses how shame becomes institutionalised within groups, reproducing its own energies seemingly irrespective of any individual's intentions, or frequently, awareness. Shame has ambivalent effects because it is founded upon the interruption of love, where the self is dependent upon the acceptance of the other, and yet the inception of identity is predicated upon separation from the other, even the renunciation of the other. Shame is a kind of imperative to the emergent self. Contempt is an emotion embodied in one's own shame that has enormous power to wound the giver and the receiver. Whether shame works purely as an infectious agent, or whether there is an 'internal resonance' – a kind of DNA psychic key – is one of the unanswerable fascinations of working with shame.