ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an approach that has been found useful when working with shame in general and especially when working with people whose inner lives are dominated by severe and chronic shame. It builds upon Kilborne (1997), suggesting that shame can reveal a window onto a crack in subjectivity and thereby, glimpses of the unconscious enigmatic otherness around which we are organized. Leah presented with a disorder of the self, bulimia nervosa, self-cutting, and body-dysmorphia, and she often described herself as 'feeling like a piece of shit'. During the course of analysis, Leah began to wonder if she had taken her father's unlived and unlivable life into her body, feeling it as a failure of her flesh and her lovability. In Laplanche's terms, Leah's shame demanded the kind of 'Copernican revolution' offered by psychoanalysis, in which the centre of her personality could move away from her ego towards her unconscious.
