From Guilt to Shame : Auschwitz and After

by Leys, Ruth

• ISBN13: 9781400827985
• ISBN10: 1400827981
• Copyright: 2008-09-02
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the "survivor syndrome." Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. InFrom Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: From Guilt to Shame	p. 1
Survivor Guilt	p. 17
The Slap	p. 17
She Demanded to Be Killed Herself and Bitten to Death	p. 24
Identification with the Aggressor	p. 32
Survivor Guilt	p. 38
The Dead	p. 47
Dismantling Survivor Guilt	p. 56
"Radical Nakedness"	p. 56
The Survivor as Witness	p. 61
Dramaturgies of the Self	p. 68
The Subject of Imitation	p. 76
Psychoanalytic Revisions	p. 83
Image and Trauma	p. 93
Imagery and PTSD	p. 93
Miscellaneous Symptoms	p. 99
Stress Films	p. 106
PTSD and Shame	p. 118
Shame Now	p. 123
Shame's Revival	p. 123
Shame and Specularity	p. 126
Shame and the Self	p. 129
Autotelism	p. 133
The Evidence	p. 137
Objectless Emotions	p. 145
The Primacy of Personal Differences	p. 150
Posthistoricism	p. 154
The Shame of Auschwitz	p. 157
The Gray Zone	p. 157
"That Match Is Never Over"	p. 162
The Matter of Testimony	p. 165
Shame	p. 170
The Flush	p. 174
Conclusion	p. 180
Appendix	p. 187
Index	p. 193
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