Chapter 7

Shame and evanescence

The body as driver of temporality
Hessel Willemsen

Introduction
In this chapter, I shall address shame, the painful affect, well known but
often neglected with regard to its ability to affect lived life, awareness of
the other, and temporality. Shame makes us aware of ourselves, our
bodies, our limitations, gaps, lacks, the care we did not receive, the privi-
leges we did not have and the deprivation we suffered. Like Sartre (1984),
I shall argue that shame is not, as many think, exclusively related to a
conscious evaluation of activities, morality, or superego, but also has an
ontological dimension. It is deeply related to an existential emptiness
lying at the core of every human being. This emptiness, or gap, involves
our awareness of death, of ending, the unique human quality to know
about the end, but this gap, or Nothingness, as Sartre would say, is also an
intrinsic psychological deadness or a negation. Shame signals deficiency
and deadness and can freeze us, or stop us short from living life and being
aware of the continuum of experience, the sliding from one experience to
another, from relating to others and to the world outside us. The irregular
process of time passing is also observable in the unavoidable changes of
the body, thereby making temporality ever present although not always
consciously observed, and often denied. I will address the ability of the
present to command the past and argue that hardly ever is the past past.
Excitement to engage, and shame to protect and moderate, influence the
quality of relationships in psychic reality.
Speaking literally, experiences are truly part of the past when we can
no longer remember them, when there is no memory trace left, and perhaps
it is more accurate to speak of a changing past when the affect cathected
to memories loses intensity. Because we adapt to new experiences and
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trauma – experiences which conjure up the past to transform1 the present –

the past is endlessly moderated and can never be found as it once was. Past
experiences, with their associated affects, are not entities in themselves but
are actually parts of present experience. In a sense, there is no past, there is
only temporality. As Lombardi would say:

I can state on the basis of several clinical experiences that giving

prominence to the subject’s relation to temporality can facilitate
change as a goal of the psychoanalytic process … and bring about
alterations to the ways affects are experienced: not by acting directly
upon them, but by working instead on the formal parameters which
organize the mind, that is primarily on its spatio-temporal organization.
(Lombardi, 2003, p. 1532)

Affects, arising from the body, need to be understood in the present tense,
within the spatio-temporal configuration which organizes the mind,2
including a relationship with the other and adaptation to environment and
trauma. Working with temporality has significant consequences for the
analytic process because the focus of the analytic intervention is not on past
experiences, as a regressive revisiting, but on the here-and-now in which
the past is processed as part of the present. The spatio-temporal organiza-
tion holds the past in the present; the past, then, is never divorced from its
current reality. Having said this, it may now appear as if the present is
privileged as a focus of understanding temporality but the next sections
will bring more complexity to the present and its connection with the past,
future, loss and identity.

Temporality
Hawking (1988, pp. 161ff.) described three notions of time which each has
a vector: psychological, entropic3 and cosmological time, denoting that time
has a direction and varying magnitude. The perception of time, psychological
time, is ever fluctuating and progressing, and has the same direction as entro-
pic time (ibid., p. 169), or in other words, we remember the past, not the
future. When considering the forward vector of time, one may observe that
the entropy of a homeostatic gas (a state of optimal order), is zero, and there-
fore entropy can be static. Could time be seen as static, or circular?
Agamben (2007) explained that Plato and Aristotle delivered a concept
of time that is circular and has no direction. Time, according to the Greeks,
 Shame and evanescence  141

‘is quantified as an infinite continuum of precise fleeting moments’ (ibid.,

p. 102). In contrast, the Christian experience of time ‘appears as a history
of salvation, the progressive realization of redemption, whose foundation
is in God’ (ibid., p. 103). Augustine considered that there was no such a
thing as a ‘precise fleeting moment’ because if the moment was severed
in its smallest part of that moment, then is there, in fact, a present? It could
be thought that the present has no length, that there is only process. It
seems to me that the present is more complex than the definition of an
infinitely small moment. To understand how future and past may take their
place in this present moment, however long, consideration is given to the
neuroscience work of Szpunar and Tulving (2011) who describe two
brain-damaged patients. The patients were able to know that they had a
past and a future but were not aware that their current self extended into
their personal past and future. They lacked an ability to anticipate the
future. Szpunar and Tulving write: ‘The capacity to appreciate one’s cur-
rent self with the future (and past) reflects the functioning of a special
form of consciousness awareness called “Autonoetic Consciousness”’
(ibid., p. 3). The present is not without anticipation, the ability to plan,
meander and indeed not without being melancholic about what will be
missed after having suffered a loss. James (2010, p. 210) discusses a
Husserlian phenomenology account ‘according to which the passage of
time . . . is constituted in and through a structure of retention and proten-
tion, according to which traces of an immediate past are retained and
future elements anticipated’.
Awareness of future and past and the passage of time is perhaps the
characteristic that most differentiates human beings from animals. Animals
evolve and adapt to a changing world, but conscious awareness of past
experiences, of the present we find ourselves in, and the active anticipation
of possible future environmental shifts, is a capacity observed mainly in
human beings. We are painfully aware of time passing, of excitement ahead
and of the ‘unbearable lightness of being’ (Kundera, 1984), of living in the
moment. Hinton (2015) aptly coined the term Homo temporalis to denote
that every experience we have has a temporal dimension: experience is
always subjected to process.

Time, evanescence and identity

Time as an experience is not linear or causal; instead, it is an experience
that is progressive and can be slow, sudden, gradual, erratic, at moments
142  Hessel Willemsen

perhaps timeless and frozen: awareness may disappear and unconscious

timelessness as described by Freud (1916[1915]/2001) may prevail. Terr
(1984) helps us to understand the distinction between a sense of time
as ‘the subjective feelings and meanings connected with the perception
of time passage’, observable in early development, and the perception of
time which she defines as ‘the conscious, and perhaps unconscious, sen-
sory experience of time’. The perception of time, or what may be referred
to as our temporal memory, usually developing around the age of 4 or 5,
is a conscious awareness of time – yesterday, today, tomorrow – as some
sort of a continuum, but our sense of time, the subjective experience of
things coming and going, of warmth and coldness, of hunger and satisfac-
tion, develops at a much earlier stage. Hartmann (1956) speaks of the
ability to distinguish between the objective and the subjective as a way of
reality testing which, to Lombardi (2003), is an aspect of time.
When considering time as progressive, is there, as a fact, a history and
a future? Einstein, for example, suggested that ‘for those of us who
believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only
a stubbornly persistent illusion’ (Speziali, 1979). It could be thought that
Einstein would have needed to anticipate a future for him to make this
well-known statement. He would say that we are only able to live in the
‘here-and-now’ but as human beings, in this here-and-now, we are only
too aware of time that has passed because of memory traces, scars, trau-
mas, adaptations we made to trauma, and indeed our progressive ageing.
The changing body denotes the existence of our biological make-up, a
past that was, and contributes to the determination of who we are, the
image we have of ourselves. Freud, discussing the beauty of Nature and
the changing of the seasons, in a brief essay ‘On Transience’, said that
‘The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of
our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm’.
Kristeva, Jardine and Blake (1981) considered that the manner in which
we experience the evanescence of our body affects the accumulation of
past experiences and referred to this accumulation as ‘historical sedimen-
tation’. The Vergänglichkeit (evanescence) of the body contributes to
who we are and therefore, by implication, the temporal dimension will be
different for men and women. Whereas men can be seen to be on a con-
tinuous hunt, women are aware of the monthly cycle, carrying their
babies, and, certainly traditionally, the care they afford their growing
children. Women are more directly in touch with nature, the cosmos,
 Shame and evanescence  143

reproduction, the beginning of life and the child’s development, a set of

experiences captured by Jung when describing ‘The archetype of The
Feminine’ (1952/1986, para. 514).

Time, loss and future

To return to Hawking and use his ideas metaphorically, entropy is gener-
ally not zero: there is process in the infinitely small moment, except of
course that some traumas may cause a state of timelessness, characterized
by an absence of chronological time in the unconsciousness, as Freud
would say, or what Scarfone refers to as the Unpast: ‘For what regards the
unconscious, what we naively designate as the past is in fact still quite
active; it may seem dead but still haunts the present and is commonly seen
as a repetition compulsion’ (2015, p. 515). The Unpast, neither past nor
present, does not become past history, nor does it open a window to the
future because there is no sense of loss. But the loss of the past and the
present, also exist when a person suffers extreme desolation. Primo Levi
describes his state of mind two weeks after he entered Monowitz, or
Auschwitz III: ‘Here I am, on the bottom. One learns quickly enough to
wipe out the past and the future if the need is pressing’ (2015, p. 32). He
continues to describe how the Italians in the camp met but that the meet-
ings stopped because it was better not to remember and think.
Temporality is that process of passing from moment to moment where
in the moment we can be troubled by our past only to press forward to our
future. In the moment, past and future are forever merged. Because of our
organic fabric, we will not manage the status quo of the homeostatic gas:
one of humanity’s predicaments, the return to the Greeks’ circular unend-
ing time, to live longer and hold life at a standstill, is ultimately always a
forlorn case, yet one of humankind’s main obsessions. We try to avoid
death. Freud grasped this determinist principle when he considered that
the death drive was fundamentally biological; its purpose was to return
the body to ashes: ‘the task of which is to lead organic life back into the
inanimate state’ (Freud, 1923/2001, p. 40). This inanimate state is death but
is also the original inanimate state of our ‘being’: organic life originated
from the inanimate. Freud goes on to say that ‘the emergence of life would
thus be the cause of the continuance of life and also at the same time of the
striving towards death’ and speaks of love and hate being blended, the
dualism of the two instincts. Life, Eros, is only possible when there is
144  Hessel Willemsen

interplay with death. The ancient emergence of burial rituals, an acknowl-

edgement of death during life, is often seen as evidence of the first signs of
awareness of futurity. This is echoed by Heidegger (2010), who thought
that the awareness of death is the basis of futurity. Loss in general seems
involved in development and awareness of temporality, as in Freud’s
description of the child who developed a ritual to deal with the temporary
loss of his mother. The game of the real which disappeared and returned
was played by the child who found the loss of his mother painful. Why then
did he repetitively have to play this painful game? Freud said that ‘It may
perhaps be said . . . that [the mother’s] departure had to be enacted as a
necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that
lay the true purpose of the game’ (Freud, 1920/2001, pp. 15–16): by mas-
tering the loss, the child could anticipate his mother’s return.
Heidegger, a philosopher of ontology, considered that the being of a
person is linked to ‘nothingness’ in that the human being is distinguished
from other beings and objects in the world through being uniquely con-
scious of death. This awareness of ‘nothingness’ is an integral part of
‘being’ of the human being (Critchley, 2004). While facing this nothing-
ness, either as a state of being, or as an endpoint to life, we are faced with
the progression of time. The child in Freud’s example lived the past, the
mother‘s departure, in the present to deal with the painful loss and to
anticipate her return. Might this knowledge help us understand how to
work with patients? Talero, when considering the respective roles of
the psychological past and present in psychoanalysis suggests that ‘It is
the patient’s present situation that has in effect “summoned” the past to
come forward’ (2004, p. 166). She considered that ‘in the phenomenon of
transference what we see is the power of the present to embody the past.’
Perhaps hope, fantasies of the future and enigmatic expectations are a
more important motivation for the initial transference. The embodiment of
the present, in my view, includes, also, if not in particular, the counter-
transference. The past – memories and experiences – are summoned to be
worked through in a process that Freud referred to as Nachträglichkeit
(Freud, 1896/2001, pp. 166–7, footnote 2).

The Other
Before we address how the past may transcend a present, we need to
understand how past experiences may have affected us. Winnicott wrote
 Shame and evanescence  145

that the original experience of primitive agony ‘cannot get into the
past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time
experience’ (1974, p. 105). Something is happening in the future, whereas
it has already happened in the past, he suggested. When considering the
patient’s fear of a breakdown, he drew attention to the possibility that the
anticipated breakdown had in fact already happened, near the beginning
of the individual’s life (ibid., p. 105). The infant was let down due to a
pattern of environmental failures leaving these babies to carry unthinkable
or archaic anxiety. He suggested that there was no ego to process the affect
that emerged in the mind of the infant. The past could only be captured in
a later present, when the ego would function well enough. Ferrari went a
step further by describing how anxiety is related to unmetabolized affect,
which arises from the body, thereby introducing the concept of affect as
originating in the infant’s body (2004, see also Carvalho, 2012 and
Willemsen, 2014, pp. 700–701). Through its ‘vertical relation’, the infant
is in touch with affect arising from the body while through the ‘horizontal
relation’, the infant relates to the mother. The ability to ‘be in touch’, with
one’s self or with another, depends on the presence of a mind, i.e., the
child’s own ‘horizontal’, which though present in incipient form in the
infant, is very rudimentary and cannot develop properly without the avail-
ability of the mother’s ‘horizontal’ until the infant’s own is properly
developed and in place. The mother’s presence of mind assists as an aux-
iliary to help modulate the infant’s unbearable distress and affects, a point
also made by Winnicott (1974, p. 104), who referred to the mother as
being the ‘auxiliary ego-function’. The inference from Winnicott’s and
Ferrari’s theories is that the infant’s environment and the affect as it
emerges in the body are reflective of the impingement of the Other, as
Scarfone (2006, p. 821) would say. The infant is highly affected by the
care that is given causing an awareness of time and difference. In addition
it is possible to conceive of the idea that the infant needs to meet and has
to deal with unconscious communications from the mother, when its ego
is still archaic and developing.

Laplanche
Laplanche gives consideration to the manner in which the maternal envi-
ronment, and particularly its unconscious content, might impose itself on
the infant. Although the notion of infantile sexuality is generally accepted,
146  Hessel Willemsen

would the mother’s sexual feelings and other unconscious motives, such as
for example having a baby to compensate for feelings of emptiness, indeed
affect the infant’s early development? Laplanche thought so. He considered
that mothers communicate sexually charged enigmatic messages to children.
This is the ‘norm’, and these messages are also enigmatic to the mothers
(Scarfone, 2013). He named this situation of being exposed to unconscious
messages from the Other, the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ refer-
ring to the primacy of the Other, the mother, who

… while [she] is attuned, as well as possible, to the needs of the

infans4 in a state of radical helplessness [Hilflosigkeit], this Other is
also, necessarily, the bearer of a repressed unconscious that somewhat
interferes within the relation of mutual adaptation between adult and
child. (Scarfone, 2013, pp. 549–50, original emphasis)

Freud referred to this original make-up of the mind as primal repression

(Freud, 1915/2001, p. 148). Whereas Laplanche emphasized the impor-
tance of the Other, Freud’s introduction of the term Hilflosigkeit ‘used to
denote the state of human suckling which, being entirely dependent on
other people for the satisfaction of its needs (hunger, thirst), proves inca-
pable of carrying out the specific action necessary to put an end to
internal tension’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 189). Laplanche empha-
sized Hilflosigkeit and thought this made the infant more permeable to
the messages of the mother.
According to Freud, the state of helplessness, for the adult, is the proto-
type of the traumatic situation based on the need to be entirely dependent
on other people for the satisfaction of their needs. The infant adapts to the
absence of the breast by creating a hallucinatory reproduction of the expe-
rience of satisfaction and, at the same time, experiences the beginning of a
sense of time. It is clear that the hallucination creates the beginning
of an image, or representation, and therefore can be seen as spatial, as
development of mind, but equally infants can await the breast and then
ruthlessly take it. Freud focused on the self, a solipsistic approach and sug-
gested that the infant creates a hallucinatory object which is repressed,
whereas Laplanche suggests that the infant is exposed to the Other who
stimulates the baby to create part of its own unconscious content.5 The
infant tries to compensate for the absence of the breast, as Freud suggested,
 Shame and evanescence  147

or tries to translate6 the Other’s unconscious content with which it has to

cope. ‘Time steps in when the infant notices that there is a message from
the Other’, but, not having the ego apparatus available to make the neces-
sary translations, the Other’s communications are repressed (Scarfone,
2006, p. 823). Having established that the infant and the young child are
inevitably subjected to the care provided by the Other and are exposed to
the unconscious motivations of the parent to which the infant necessarily
needed to adapt, the question remains how these past experiences then
continue to affect our lives now.

Nachträglichkeit
It is worth considering that analysis addressing early trauma is not a
reductive exercise but focuses on the reworking of the past in the present.
Nachträglichkeit, or après coup, introduced in Freud’s early writings
(Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, pp. 111–14; for a discussion of après coup,
see Perelberg, 2006), refers to the endless, unconscious reinterpretations
of affect released by the originating body, which could not be mentalized
at the time during infancy, as well as memories and cognitively endowed
affective experiences originating at later stages of development. The
affects are coated with enigma because the mother’s response to the infant
was inevitably suffused with her unconscious motives. The body and mind
carry memories of unmetabolized truths about gaps in care or more obvi-
ous traumatic experience, as well as the enigmatic messages to which the
infant was exposed, leading to the necessary incompleteness of the self as
the first object. The consequent shifts of memory following these reinter-
pretations also evoke shifts in our sense of time and its rhythms. Freud
referred to ‘psychical temporality and causality’ as revisiting experiences,
memory-traces and impressions at a later date to fit in with fresh experi-
ences or the attainment of a new meaning, or stage of development
(Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 111). Through the mechanism of
Nachträglichkeit, memories and imprints can be reorganized to transcend
the present and provide a different outlook on life which makes us, in turn,
principally teleological beings; we have an apparent purpose in the antic-
ipated future. A person may be endowed with psychical effectiveness, or,
in other words, the experience of life, and the outlook on life, may alter
due to a reworking of experiences in the present, a process Scarfone
148  Hessel Willemsen

(2006) referred to as ‘the production of the past’. Sartre emphasizes this

coming together of past and present in his work Being and Nothingness
where he writes:

Since the past is no more, since it has melted away into nothingness, if
the memory continues to exist, it must be by virtue of the present
modification of our being … the body, the present perception, and the
past as a present impression in the body – all is actuality. (1984, p. 160)

For Sartre there is no actual past, only imprints and memories, of the past,
which we carry with us organically. The presence of the past in the pres-
ent is actual. Later Sartre repeats this point: ‘My past never appears
isolated in its “pastness”; it would be absurd even to imagine that it can
exist as such. It is originally the past of this present’ (ibid., p. 163). If the
past is isolated in its ‘pastness’, we would have lost the memory of the
event, the memory has then faded. The historical past is only found out-
side us, as buildings, bones and the paper I write but also through a
collective passing on of cultural memory, or collective unconscious
(see, for example, Jung, 1953) and the genetic blueprint we leave behind.
I would say, however, that the body carries a past that is no more, which
leads me to talk about evanescence.

Evanescence
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ (1923/2008)
is a short fantasy story about a man who reversed in age; he was born an
old man and died a baby. The slow vanishing of his wrinkled body makes
it possible for Benjamin Button to become young and love Hildegarde
whose body ages normally. Time is of the essence as he becomes younger
and she older, making for a window of time in which they can be lovers.
The story leaves us with awareness that our body is the concrete evidence
of changing times, of time past, and this change takes place slowly,
gradually, but surely.
Evanescence comes from the Latin evanescere meaning ‘to disappear,
vanish’. Something that possesses qualities of evanescence has the char-
acteristic of disappearing or vanishing, like being gripped with the fear of
losing feelings of love and memories after a painful separation. Evanescence
would imply that there is a history, something that has vanished away and
 Shame and evanescence  149

no longer exists. Throughout life, the body presents with evidence of the
loss of youth, of time past, of what has been and of what never was. In
contrast to loss, the body is also reflective of a healthy life, a life well
lived and of time passed satisfactorily. The body, it could be said, carries
historicity.7 There is a biological past that is no more; the youthful body
that once was is no longer part of the present. The passing of time
expressed by the ageing body may reflect memories which can no longer
be remembered and have truly become past. The awareness of the ageing
body may imply a pre-existing time-consciousness. The demise of the
body, of what has been, drives time, drives the perception of the future and
makes us anticipatory in the moment, as Sartre suggested. The actuality of
the body, denoting the liveliness of the present and a past that has been,
stands in contrast with what has gone, the body that is no more. The psy-
chological gaps and lacks we carry with us define who we are and are
shielded from us and from others by shame. It seems to me that shame
protects and helps contain insufferable trauma, but the shame also makes
us want to disappear and so we set up barriers and move away from others
and ourselves.

Shame
Shame is probably one of the most difficult emotions we as humans have
to deal with. Often described as a painful feeling of humiliation or dis-
tress caused by a conscious feeling of wrongdoing, shame is about being
seen by the other, or about observing oneself. Shame can be defined at
two levels. The first well-known definition is related to the superego, the
feeling of failure related to demands we place on ourselves and judge-
ments we consider others have of us, as discussed, for example, by
Kernberg. He sees shame as a function of superego realizations, efforts
to live up to newly incorporated aspects of the ego-ideal. In his view:
‘Under ordinary circumstances, shame is gradually replaced by the devel-
opment of guilt over unacceptable behaviour’ (2015, p. 640). This level
of shame is more easily conscious, accessible to awareness and readily
seen by me, or somebody observing me. Shame at this level may be
described as a feeling, an emotion that has some sort of judgement related
to it; the emotion can, principally, be thought about.
A more profound level of shame relates to what Jacoby (1994) describes
as shame and organizational forms of the sense of self. He refers to the
150  Hessel Willemsen

biblical myth of Paradise (ibid., p. 49) which he considers is the opening

up of consciousness, a dawning awareness concerned with the separation
of self and others and from God, which results in the loss of Paradise and
eternal bliss. Jacoby, influenced by the work of Stern and Lichtenberg,
considered that the capacity to experience shame first appears in connec-
tion with the realization that the self can also be seen from the outside. An
‘objective self’ has been born that stands against the merely ‘subjective
self’ of earlier phases. The origins of shame, however, lie in the ‘subjec-
tive self’ and have a connection with the psyche-soma at early stages of
development. Feeling comfortable with oneself is also about feeling com-
fortable with one’s body: ‘we may be so ashamed of our bodies that we
can hardly live with or in them’ (ibid., p. 50). Shame, Jacoby argues, is at
the core of the formation of self-esteem, an important organizational
aspect of the sense of self as described by Stern (1985). Jacoby referred to
shame as an innate affect, connected to feeling inferior when being aware
of the other. Shame, according to Tomkins (1987), may be experienced as
shyness when there is a wish to have an immediate intimate relationship
with somebody else, but can also be experienced as guilt ‘when positive
affect is attenuated by virtue of moral normative sanctions experienced as
conflicting with what is exciting or enjoyable’ (Demos, 1995, p. 404). He
also defines shame experienced as inferiority when ‘discouragement is
located in the self as an inability of the self to do what the self wishes to
do’; shame supports the regulation of excitement.
In her search for the origins of shame, and acknowledging that our
forebears hardly, or limitedly, addressed shame, Wharton concluded that
‘shame is above all linked to a person’s self-image or sense of self’ (1990,
p. 328). For her, shame involves the whole self, including the body, such
that a person in the grip of shame has a sense of shrinking, of collapse, an
overwhelming impulse to hide, related to a sense of inner deficiency or
badness which must be kept hidden. Wharton, like Jacoby, considers
the origins of shame to be innate and leads to an impulse to hide from the
other who is looking at and observing us. When observing infants in
the presence of the mother, and particularly the face of the mother with its
all-important ability to respond to the baby, shame is observable. As
Levinas noted: ‘Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words
takes place already within the primordial face to face language’ (Levinas,
1961/1969, p. 206). Scarfone (2006), similarly, referred to ‘the impinge-
ment of the Other’. It is of course the mother who provides meaning to the
many affective states the infant experiences when relating to his mother
 Shame and evanescence  151

and to his body. The mother inevitably cannot remain focused on the
infant indefinitely and, even when focused, she misses out on interests,
excitements and disappointments expressed by the infant who may
respond, when the mother repeatedly misses out, with upset, anger, or
withdrawing into himself.
Shame can be understood as a response to the disappearance of the
face of the Other, and also as a response to enigmas, the unconscious
messages of the Other the infant is faced with but cannot translate. Shame
can be seen as a response to unmetabolized affect, of the lacks and gaps
which inevitably are part of the self when we live with the Other who at
times is unresponsive, particularly in the early days of life. The face of
the Other, either a person outside us, or our objective self, may help us
embrace shame to reach a deeper openness without the ego’s precondi-
tions. It is the face of the Other as Levinas suggested, and the awareness
of our limits, which reminds us of ‘that little clod of earth that we are’
(Hinton, 1998, p. 184 and Adler, 1973, p. 19, fn. 8). Shame, Hinton
argues, could be a teacher, ‘an everyday guide to humble knowing’ (ibid.,
p. 172) while bearing the painfulness of what might not have been
received. As a fundamental feeling reflecting the unmetabolized past,
shame lives with us through our times as an observer: we have an intan-
gible sense of what we might have been deprived of, a conscious
awareness which would not have been evident in a state of privation, but
can only become apparent subsequently. In such moments of time, how-
ever much we can learn, shame is also a painful reminder of the finite self.

Temporality, shame and evanescence

We progress through time, while registering sensations, experiences
and ideas, sometimes as a gradual process, sometimes disjointed or
stilted, at other times as if there is no movement. We can open up to
what feels unknown and troubling; when we need to adapt to everyday
life and its traumas, we summon our memories to understand the actu-
alities we find ourselves in. The past, processed in the present, was
formed when affect could not be metabolized, unconscious fantasies of
the Other could not be processed and enigmas not translated. The
unmetabolized affects and enigmas resonate with Nothingness because
we cannot be perfectly attuned to, and neither can we resolve nor dis-
pose of, all that is lost or never was. This existential emptiness lies at
the core of every human being.
152  Hessel Willemsen

By implication, shame closely linked to our self-esteem is, I think,

ontological, indeed existential (Hultberg, 1988). Associated with the
meaning of life, shame regulates excitement and lust, and serves to hide
painful parts of ourselves, full of dark affect. Erikson spoke of two basic
alternating moods as those of ‘carnival’ and ‘atonement’: ‘the first gives
licence and leeway to sensual involvement, to relief and release at all cost;
the second surrenders to the negative conscience which constricts,
depresses, and enjoins man for what he has left unresolved, uncared for,
unatoned’ (1958, p. 75). Shame negotiates a life between lust and reflec-
tion, between Enlightenment and Memento Mori. One cannot help but
think of Narcissus and Goldmund: Narcissus’s atonement complemented
Goldmund’s lust for life and neither could be without the other (Hesse,
2006)8. Shame serves as an intermediate between the reality of the world
outside us, the excitement we have available to relate, and the darkness
that needs protecting. Significant levels of shame may prevent us from
being in the moment, from living life and from unlocking the past to deal
with current traumatic situations to which one need necessarily adapt. On
the other hand, flight from shame, or its possibility, can also result in a
frozen life without depth.
Shame is found in the subjective self, is part of the psyche-soma and
influences our sense of self and our body-image. Acutely aware of the
changing organic fabric of our body, we are confronted with the lacks
and gaps early in life. Connolly speaks of the importance of the body, a
psychic deadness that preserves all that did not happen: ‘The result of
this traumatic non-happening is that temporality which is part and parcel
of possessing an alive body becomes excluded and the future is fore-
closed’ (2013, p. 651). She quoted Merleau-Ponty: ‘The body is our
general medium of having a world’ (Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Connolly,
ibid., p. 637). Through the changing body, shame is observed, some-
times projected upon: the perception of the body can be a manifestation
of unspeakable shame. Distastefulness or fear of our body causes tem-
porality to be a painstakingly complex process and interrupts the
enjoyment of being with others. Shame can truly be a stumbling block
to further development because of the humiliation and the suffering that
may become exposed. It is hard to imagine human development without
the notion of shame.
However, humbly accepting the humanity of life may make it possible to
observe the changes in mind and body to give meaning to shameful moments.
 Shame and evanescence  153

Sartre (1984, p. 174) speaks of the ‘evanescent value of the past’ when the
past is used to transcend the present and quotes Hegel: ‘Wesen ist was
gewesen ist’, an allusion to the historical nature of essence (ibid., p. 175).
Perhaps certain experiences can never be shrugged off, but I think that the
intensity of affect may be reduced, so that the original experience, with its
associated affect, will not be the same, certainly not in its intensity.
Surprisingly we may find ourselves in more navigable waters and discover
that ‘The past is never where you think you left it’, as Katherine Anne Porter
said (1962). There is the possibility to move forward; purpose is found
when we undo the past (Scarfone, 2006).
There may be implications for technique when the focus of interven-
tions is on working through trauma, regression, or repetition-compulsion
as a way of repeating past trauma, or creating awareness from the perspec-
tive of the objective self. The focus of analytic work is not on the past, but
on the actuality of the past in the present. Over the course of psychoana-
lytic history, the focus of technique has increasingly moved from analysing
the repressed to working with patients in the present. The ability to be with
the patient in the here-and-now, particularly being attuned to one’s coun-
tertransference and accepting that there is a significant unknown, a
Nothingness, makes it possible to reconcile with the patient’s temporality:
the slow, or sometimes rapid, perhaps stifling or disjointed progression
through the felt experiences as a way of developing increasingly more
contact with the outer world.
The importance of working in the here-and-now was, among others,
expressed by Bion for whom ‘psychoanalytic observation is concerned
neither with what has happened nor with what is going to happen but
with what is happening’ (1967/1996, p. 17). The past is not something
that is removed from us but is at all times part of us: ‘The past is never
dead. It’s not even past’ (Faulkner, 1951). Ogden (2015) critically
addresses the interpretative method, the verbalization of what has just
happened. When the interpretation is made, the state of shared affect has
already taken place. Ogden prefers the intuiting psychic reality. This is
elsewhere referred to as ‘Moments of Meeting’ coined by the Boston
Change Process Study Group (BCPSG, 2010), acknowledging that intu-
iting psychic reality or being attuned to it is essentially a complex
process, for the infant, but also later in life. An interpretation comes after
‘the psychoanalyst’s intuition of reality with which he must be at one’
(Bion 1967/1996, p. 17).
154  Hessel Willemsen

In summary, I would say that the inevitability of death is the driver of

temporality marking the ineluctability of time. Temporality manifests in
its most primal way during the moment in which, according to Heidegger,
past, present and future converge, he called the ‘ecstasies’ of time, a unity
of these three dimensions (2010, p. 319ff.). Time moves as a gradient
beginning some time in utero and ending at the final breath. These
ecstases cannot be thought of without considering shame, so important in
its ontological meaning, relating to the chronic incompleteness of the
person, and therefore without considering the incompleteness of the body.
This chronic sense of incompleteness and finitude creates a quality of
shame in life, varying with particular circumstances. Temporality, shame
and mortality are strongly interconnected.

Notes
1 New experiences and trauma, to which the individual needs to adapt, resonate
with similar past experiences or trauma to accommodate particularly the affec-
tive component of the present experience. The past and present experience may
amalgamate to a new representation of the present while also altering the past.
Going forward the present experience transforms, has gone beyond the actual
experience, to include past memory and affect, making for a healthy adaptation.
2 Freud is helpful in understanding ‘temporal-spatial configuration’ when he
introduces time as working through emotions when one loses a loved one
(Freud 1917/2001). The process of working through requires a space, or a
mind, to represent memory and affect (Ferrari, 2004).
3 The measure of such randomness and disorder in the universe is called ‘entropy’.
In chemistry, entropy (represented by the capital letter S) is a thermodynamic
function that describes the randomness and disorder of molecules based on the
number of different arrangements available to them in a given system or reac-
tion (Smith & Van Ness, 1987, pp. 148ff.). The second law of thermodynamics
states that the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time, or
remains constant in ideal cases where the system is in a steady state or under-
going a reversible process (ibid., pp. 155ff.). Hawking said: ‘there are always
many more disordered than there are ordered ones’ (1988, p. 162).
4 Scarfone uses the terms ‘infans’ helpfully in that the root meaning of the word
‘infans’ is not speaking, i.e., without words, or before words (Cresswell, 2010).
5 Laplanche reintroduced Freud’s seduction theory, which he largely abandoned
in favour of the structural model. About Freud’s seduction theory, he said:
‘[M]y job has been to show why Freud missed some very important points in
this theory. But before saying that we must revise the theory, we must know it.
And I think that ignorance concerning the seduction theory causes people to
go back to something pre-analytic. By discussing the seduction theory, we are
 Shame and evanescence  155

doing justice to Freud, perhaps doing Freud better justice than he did himself.
He forgot the importance of his theory, and its very meaning, which was not just
the importance of external events’ (Caruth, 2001).
6 Translation is a term introduced by Laplanche. He said that an enigmatic message
first needs to be translated because it does not have a factual context. Once trans-
lated, the message has become part of a communication and can be interpreted
(see, for example, Caruth, 2001, para. 108).
7 Historicity is the historical actuality of persons and events, meaning the quality
of being part of history as opposed to being a historical myth, legend, or fiction.
Historicity focuses on the truth value of knowledge claims about the past (denot-
ing historical actuality, authenticity, and factuality). The historicity of a claim
about the past is its factual status.
8 In Narcissus and Goldmund, the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory
of the Apollonian versus Dionysian spirit is evident. The polarization of
Narcissus’s individualist Apollonian character stands in contrast to the pas-
sionate and zealous disposition of Goldmund. Hesse, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s
The Birth of Tragedy, completes the equation by creating Goldmund as a
wanderer (a Dionysian endeavour) balanced out by Narcissus, the structured
and stable priest-monk (an Apollonian approach), and highlighting the har-
monizing relationship of the main characters.

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