ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the ego's insufficiencies, as well as those denoted and connoted by shame and humiliation, are only conceivable from the references offered by the relationships the ego has with the system of ideals with which it coexists. It considers the ego the locus where shame and humiliation are experienced. The chapter focuses on the ego's plunging into "heroic identification" as a way to "resolve" the narcissistic injury caused by humiliation. It offers some ideas about the role of shame as one of the organisers of human behaviour in society. In order to develop the author's point of view, from a psychoanalytical perspective on humiliation and shame, the author must establish that human subjectivity is a product of culture. The image of one's self is predetermined by bonds that predate a person's birth; it begins to exist in the minds of the future parents.
