ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses shame, the painful affect, well known but often neglected with regard to its ability to affect lived life, awareness of the other, and temporality. It expresses that shame is not, as many think, exclusively related to a conscious evaluation of activities, morality or superego, but has an ontological dimension. It is deeply related to an existential emptiness lying at the core of every human being. Affects, arising from the body, need to be understood in the present tense, within the spatio-temporal configuration which organizes mind, including a relationship with the other and adaptation to environment and trauma. Awareness of future and past and the passage of time is perhaps the characteristic that most differentiates human beings from animals. Laplanche gives consideration to the manner in which the maternal environment, and particularly its unconscious content, might impose itself on the infant. Evanescence would imply that there is a history, something that has vanished away and no longer exists.
