Renaissance concepts of shame and Pocaterra's 'Dialoghi Della Vergogna.' (1592 book by Annibale Pocaterra)

PERSONS OF AUTHORITY in early modern Europe--whether parents, preachers or princes--knew well that among the resources available to them for controlling behavion and maintaining hierarchies, there was always shame. Humankind, to its woe, had experienced shame in the Garden of Eden. Noah had been shamed by his nakedness, Sarah by her barrenness, Jacob by his effeminate body, Potiphar's wife through her brazen advances. Hesiod had introduced two sorts of shame: the right kind, derived from modesty; and the wrong kind, produced by poverty. These instances, and many others from ancient and medieval sources, lay at hand for easy use by Renaissance moralists, and who is not a moralist? Applying their own imaginative skills to techniques and rituals of humiliation, medieval and early modern people devised such innovations as the pitture infamanti, the dunce cap, the stocks, the charivari, the yellow badge. The "civilizing process" that transformed manners toward the end of the period introduced further refinements, and later ages have continued to elaborate and embellish the dubious attainments of the ancients in this area.

This article has two purposes. The first is to describe and begin to analyze a virtually unknown but extremely interesting and thoughtful treatise on shame, emanating from an Italian court toward the end of the Cinquecento. The second, which will be tackled first, is to construct an intellectual context for this late Renaissance discussion of shame by surveying a number of earlier instances in the literature that would have been familiar to any educated reader in the sixteenth century. A completely different group of exempla might serve just as well, but those offered here should convey a general sense of the scope and scale of shame and shaming in the consciousness of literate Europeans. Vast chapters of the history of the emotions remain unwritten. This essay is meant to be part of one of them.

Shame functions as one pole on several different axes. Probably the most familiar of these is the shame-guilt axis, which is examined frequently in both scholarly and popular contexts. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict contributed to the reification of these categories in her post-war work on Japan by positing a fundamental distinction between "guilt cultures" and "shame cultures."(1) Shortly thereafter E. R. Dodds applied this model to the Greeks and proposed that the shame culture of the archaic period evolved into a guilt culture by the fifth century B.C.(2) Neither of these scholars seems to have realized that when it comes to shame and guilt, on both the personal and societal levels, one can have it all. That perception, which seems obvious in a period more attuned to the polysemous than to the polis, was first introduced for the Greeks in 1971 by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, who observed that from the beginning Greek culture involved important elements of guilt, and even in the Hellenistic period it continued to preserve many elements of a shame culture.(3)

A second axis, carefully noted by early commentators on shame, both links and contrasts this powerful emotion with fear. A common explanation for this conjunction is that the absence of shame--what we call shamelessness--results in behavior indistinguishable from fearlessness. Robert Burton makes this point vividly: "I know there be many base, impudent, brazen-faced rogues, that will ... be moved with nothing, take no infamy or disgrace to heart, laugh at all; let them be proved perjur'd, stigmatized, convict rogues, theeves, traitors, loose their eares, be whipped, branded, carted, pointed at, hissed, & derided ..., they rejoice at it, what care they? We have too many such in our times."(4) These miscreants are contrasted with modest men, sensitive to their reputations, people who would rather die than "suffer the least defamation of honour, or blot in [their] good name."

Burton's use of the word honour prepares us for yet another polarity. This is what recent writers like Stern and Nathanson, approaching shame from a psychoanalytic perspective, have described as the shame-pride axis.(5) These clinicians hold that, as Nathanson put it, "pride and shame form an axis intimately related to the modulation of self-esteem" and this self-evaluative paradigm begins to emerge in infancy with the sense of self. On the personal level, shame may be invoked by insults to one's pride or one's sense of honor, though these terms differ in their connotations.(6)

Shame enters human consciousness at a very early stage in the lives of individuals and of peoples. It persists as a permanent aspect of the repertory of affects that may be invoked through interaction with others, imagined as well as real. The potentiality of shaming is, in consequence, a resource available to virtually all the people with whom anyone interacts over a lifetime, especially to apparent superiors. To the extent that we are in a position to assess our history, this has always been so, at least in the West. Shame certainly figures prominently in literature, from Hesiod and Homer through the Confessions of Saint Augustine and on into Dante and Shakespeare, who uses the word 344 times, as well as other several cognate forms such as shameful, shaming, and shames.(7)

Although shame is a reasonably common aspect of both art and life, the paucity of serious theoretical or analytical work devoted to it in the past is striking. Even Aristotle, whose observations in the Nicomachean Ethics constitute the locus classicus for most subsequent treatments, deals with shame in a somewhat perfunctory manner. In the twenty-four lines devoted to shame, he makes the following points: shame is not really a virtue but rather an affect, or feeling; shame is more becoming to youth than to maturity, for persons of ripe years should know how to avoid the causes that produce shame; shame is thus conditionally a good thing because it helps us to avoid bad actions, but to experience shame is not in itself good, for it is expressive of our knowledge that we have done, or are believed to have done, something bad. In this regard Aristotle compares shame with continence, which is also "not virtue, but a mixed sort of state."(8)

Perhaps there are some clues here as to why shame has been, as Nathanson puts it, the "ignored emotion." In the first place, Aristotle's succinct or even perfunctory treatment of shame belittles its importance, placing it as part of a relatively minor subset among the affects. Had shame been "foregrounded" there, its subsequent position in the intellectual history of the emotions would doubtless have been more prominent. The philosopher's decision to deny to shame the status of a virtue contributed further to its marginal role in the history of the emotions. Finally, Aristotle's view of shame as a simple matter, admitting of no problems, loose ends, or unresolved ambiguities, discouraged inquiry.

Over the succeeding centuries, therefore, moral and ethical theorists were willing to let matters lie. While acknowledging the role of shame in distinguishing virtuous from vicious behavior, they manifested little or no interest in reexamining the concept. If Aristotle had made the essential philosophical distinctions, early medical authorities established the physiological baselines. Galen wrote of shame as an essential attribute of persons who wish to avoid wrongdoing, a preventative control mechanism against immoderate behavior in both the private and public spheres.(9) Pliny similarly presents shame as a physiologically-induced source of modesty, locating it (as Aristotle did) in the cheeks, which, as he notes, are unique to humankind. "The cheeks are the seat of modesty: on them a blush is most visible."(10) Thus the physicians echo, but do very little to augment Aristotle's cursory formulations.

While philosophers and theologians gave shame short shrift, poets and preachers took it very seriously indeed. Dante, for example, identifies shame in the expected form of a humiliated recognition of malfeasance; but he also sees it, as have generations of coaches and military commanders, as a goad to action, to the confrontation and mastering of one's own fear. In Dante's fictive personal case this refers first of all to the fear of flying on the back of the monstrous beast Geryon.(11) The poet, trembling, masters his fear so as to maintain his honor, reminding us of the axis explicitly evoked in several places in the Commedia. Dante also understood the shame of an inferior rebuked and the scarring such humiliation can produce. In Inferno 30 Dante is staring, transfixed by a group of falsifying sinners, especially counterfeiters, when Vergil scolds him for staring at them. In childlike contrition the poet says: "Quand' io 'l senti' a me parlar con ira, / volsimi verso lui con tal vergogna, / ch'ancor per la memoria mi si gira." ("When I felt him speak to me in anger, I turned toward him with such shame that it whirls me through my memory even now").(12) It is the third line of this stanza, with its perennial echoing of shame remembered, that signals the poet's insight into the economy of shame. He goes on to describe his continuing response in this situation as feeling as though he were in a dreamlike state, speechless ("non possendo parlare," l. 139) and constantly making apologies without being aware of doing so. This is a most compelling portrait of mortification, and indeed of the spontaneous, uncontrollable, and unconscious way in which we may react to a shaming stimulus. It corresponds precisely to Nathanson's clinical description of the moment of shame, as producing "a cognitive shock, a period of time during which we are unable to think clearly or plot effective action."(13) Whether or not this has been correctly associated, as Nathanson believes, with a neurochemical reaction in the brain, it is certainly clear in Dante's case that "some quality of the self has been brought into question."(14) Incidentally, Vergil notices the extremity of Dante's pain, and immediately tells him to lighten up: "`Maggior difetto men vergogna lava,' / disse 'l maestro, `che 'l tuo non e stato; / pero d'ogne trestizia ti disgrava. / E fa ragion ch'io ti sia sempre allato.'"(15) (" `Less shame washes away a greater fault than yours was,' said the master. `Therefore unburden yourself of all sadness, and think about the fact that I am always at your side.'") But as with so many parental apologies and patriarchal or matriarchal retractions, the damage has already, ineradicably, been done: "ancor per la memoria mi si gira."

Among the outward manifestations of shame are the blush and the gaze, and Dante understood these signs as well as the hidden stigmata we bear "per la memoria." At the very bottom of Hell, he comes upon a frozen lake full of spirits whose heads protrude through the ice. Their bodies are livid, he tells us, "up to where the hue of shame appears."(16) In addition to the revealing blush, they signal their shame by turning their faces away. The downturned or covered face, the averted gaze, the attempt to mask or divert attention from a site of physical embarrassment--all were well understood by late medieval and early modern commentators on manners and morals.(17)

They also recognized a fundamental distinction between shame incurred through some moral shortcoming or behavioral impropriety and shame deliberately undertaken as a voluntary chastisement of the self. Vergogna of the latter kind--Italian makes no linguistic distinction here--may be a manifestation of sufficient goodness to land an otherwise evil soul in Purgatory. This is the case with Provenzan Salvani, a Tuscan ruler who squatted like a beggar in the marketplace in Siena seeking money to buy the release of an imprisoned friend. Dante's source text uses the word vergognosamente to describe Provenzan's begging, and the poet follows this saying that Provenzan "put aside all shame"--"ogne vergogna diposta."(18)

The willing acceptance of humiliation, or even mortification, as an appropriate means toward a socially desirable end finds personal as well as institutional expression throughout early modern Italian society. This is clearly one meaning of the remarkably expressive gesture performed by Caterina Sforza during the siege of Forli in 1488, according to Machiavelli. Returning to the city, she allowed the besieging troops to hold her two young sons as hostages while she rejoined her people in the citadel, assuring her attackers that she would have it turned over to them. However, having reached the ramparts, she showered curses upon the assailants. Then, suddenly, she lifted her skirts high, "mostro loro le membra genitali."(19) Machiavelli interprets this as her way of saying that she had the means of replacing her sons. But he also describes the witnesses as taken aback, slow to recognize their error. It is they who were shamed by this unexpected gesture which transformed its essential obscenity into a gendered political humiliation. Like Dante, they experienced a cognitive shock rendering them "unable to think clearly or take effective action," although by conventional standards they were not the transgressors.

Some authorities challenge the factual basis of Machiavelli's account.(20) But even as fiction the story serves well because it figures a more general sixteenth-century reexamination of the social utility, and multivalence, of the gestural semiotics implicit in the shame-pride axis. A brief look at More's Utopia should illustrate this point. J. H. Hexter showed long ago that a fundamental theme in Utopia was the suppression of prideful distinctions among the inhabitants of the imaginary republic.(21) It is evident, though not yet widely recognized, that in Utopia many arrangements designed to keep pride in check may by the same token be seen as functioning to eliminate shame.

Indeed, in some respects the suppression or subversion of shaming mechanisms works even better than pride as an underlying principle for understanding the Utopians and their egalitarian world. When the European ambassadors with all their finery and golden adornments visit Utopia, they eventually discover to their embarrassment that the Utopians assumed they were slaves and their plainly-dressed servants were the real ambassadors. As to the Utopians themselves, they are gentle voluptuaries, dedicated to the harmless pleasures of well-tuned minds and well-toned bodies. They accept themselves while seeking to perfect themselves. Thus couples contemplating marriage are required to inspect each other's bodies and, in the rare instances where it is wanted, divorce, along with remarriage, is permitted. In Utopia serious crimes are punished by slavery, which is usually temporary. But those who in other societies are treated as inferiors--the mentally and physically handicapped--in Utopia are readily accepted. Life in Utopia is life at the mid-point of the shame-pride axis, whether in terms of bodily/sexual shame (pudor) or some other form of internalized inadequacy (verecundia). No one is blamed or shamed for something s/he cannot help in this imaginary world where communitarian values negate the real world's hierarchies.

Present everywhere on the level of experience and awareness, shame remains an elusive topic in the history of ethical and moral theory. Nevertheless, it is not left entirely to the poets, playwrights, and novellisti.(22) In 1538, near the end of his long and productive life, Juan Luis Vives published his remarkable treatise De anima et vita, in which he offers a brief discussion of the fear of shame. Vives concerns himself almost entirely with sexual shame. As a modern commentator observes, his discussion is rooted in "the Greek sense of this honor, and the Roman emphasis on decorous and proper behavior" fused with "a characteristic note of Catholic prudishness."(23) Two years later, though not obviously influenced by this example, the obscure Portuguese physician Antonio Luiz (d. 1565) published a small treatise, De occultis proprietatibus, to which he added several brief, apparently unrelated essays. One of these bears the title De pudore. It is a compilation of classical references to shame, primarily sexual modesty but also instances of shaming in ancient military situations. The work lacks evidence from contemporary or personal experience and is curiously inconclusive, aside from reasserting the importance of shame as a preservative of the existing order.(24) Yet it may serve as an early sign of a growing interest among sixteenth-century physicians and philosophers in the emotions, an interest that may also be limned out in such settings as courtesy books and, more surprisingly, treatises on the eyes and texts on physiognomy.(25)

In 1592 the first book-length discussion of shame was published. Its author was Annibale Pocaterra, a young physician who at twenty-three had already been admitted to faculty status at the University of Ferrara. The son of a prominent courtier to whom Tasso had addressed ten poems and dedicated his dialogue De ludo, Pocaterra was also a talented poet, several of whose amorous stanzas were set to music by such madrigalists as Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Alfonso Fontanelli.(26) Perhaps the earliest references to Pocaterra appear in Agostino Superbi's biographical dictionary of Ferrarese notables, published in 1620. Superbi describes him as a person "of very beautiful intellect and a most handsome face, a physician, an excellent philosopher, accomplished in his knowledge of literature, a not unworthy poet and a very promising youth."(27) He then notes that Pocaterra died at the age of thirty. Another source gives the year of the author's death as 1592, the year when the Two Dialogues on Shame made their first and only appearance.(28)

In the rich sixteenth-century literature concerning the virtues and the vices, Pocaterra's book is a classic example of neglect or, better, an example of a neglected classic. The untimely death of the author, whose reputation was confined to the learned circles of his native city; the fact that he lived and published in a small city, which in addition soon lost its political and intellectual independence; the choice of a topic not generally regarded as requiring sustained treatment--all these factors may have contributed to the book's obvious lack of impact. In addition, it was written in dialogue form, which together with its rather abstract and necessarily speculative approach may have lessened its appeal to physicians, while its examination of the physiological aspects of shame could well have alienated more humanistically-inclined readers.(29)

Although this is not an easy work to categorize or summarize, owing both to its several voices and the richness and subtlety of Pocaterra's ideas, a brief survey of the work may induce scholars to begin to take notice of it. The Two Dialogues takes place among three speakers, all of whom correspond to reasonably welldocumented personages at the court of Alfonso II d'Este. The most authoritative voice in the dialogues is that of Orazio Ariosto, a contemporary and a close friend of the author's. A grandnephew of the poet, Orazio was himself a poet, playwright, and neo-Aristotelian philosopher. He died only a year after Pocaterra, but his life is far better documented, and there is a recent and commendable study of his life and works.(30) In Pocaterra's book Ariosto plays the role of a Socratic mentor, certainly in character with what is known of him in "real life." His disciples are Alessandro Guarino and Hercole Castello.(31) In the dialogues Guarino's role is that of an articulate but often slightly wrongheaded companion, while Castello appears as a younger, less sophisticated seeker of knowledge, representative of the more activist branch of Alfonso's circle, a boisterous brigade of soldiers, hunters, and fishermen.(32)

Pocaterra's project is neither simple nor particularly well organized. Nevertheless, its purpose is clear: to vindicate shame as a useful and appropriate part of the sensorium and to explain what it is, how it works, and what it contributes to the well-being of those who experience it. That a book with this orientation appeared in a particularly closed and aristocratic courtly society, with its exaggerated concern for etiquette and ceremony, comes as yet another piece of evidence in support of Norbert Elias's view that courts of the late sixteenth-century pioneered in developing new and ingenious modes of behavioral modification and affect control underlying virtually all modern forms of social organization and conduct.(33)

While it is evident that Orazio Ariosto represents the authorial voice throughout the two dialogues, Pocaterra makes his stance clear in the prefatory epistle, in which he dedicates the book to his patron Duke Alfonso II d'Este. The author acknowledges the extreme delicacy of the task of presenting a book on shame to someone who has never had occasion to feel it. Only his debt to the duke can justify a subject that, in personal terms, seems so inappropriate.(34) This is a disingenuous maneuver, for by the early 1590s Alfonso had obviously and publicly failed in his most important task--producing an heir, and that with three wives. It was generally known that the consequence of Alfonso's dying without a successor would be the end of Estean claims to the duchy of Ferrara, which would then revert to papal control after more than 300 years of dynastic rule. Pocaterra therefore distanced himself from the stigma--actually the shame--of Alfonso's evident infertility by means of two apparently contradictory strategies: denying the duke's experience of shame while at the same time declaring shame to be "in the end, an honest thing and, if not a virtue, at least very close and very similar to virtue."(35) The reconciling principle here is that shame is a good thing if a person needs it, but the goal is to be able to live without it. Thus, Pocaterra says, the duke "will be able to see his own shining candor set against other people's redness."(36)

This reference to the commonest involuntary expression of shame prepares the way for the First Book, which considers what we call the physiology of shame and seeks to define what sort of phenomenon shame is. In this section Guarino functions as a latterday stand-in for Aristotle, expressing the traditional view so that Ariosto is in a position to provide fresh insights. Ariosto is unwilling to accept shame as a virtue; it is in the same category as fear, which is an affect, or feeling. His most recurrent image is of the body as a battlefield through which the blood rushes like troops in response to various threats and alarms. For example, when we fear death, blood leaves the limbs (which therefore grow weak) to protect the heart, "the principal seat of life."(37) Should a more external attribute such as one's honor come under attack, the blood moves to the appropriate areas, like people roused to defend their town in the middle of the night. Because shame threatens the soul that is revealed to us by means of facial expression, blood rushes to the face to cover it.(38) Gesture provides a second line of defense, for in a state of shame "people cover their face with their hands and lower their eyes as if they wanted their whole face to disappear under their brows."(39) The Renaissance iconography of shame, from Masaccio to Titian and in literature from Dante to Shakespeare, echoes this observation.

For Ariosto/Pocaterra these physiological responses are governed by an innate rationality. Reason governs and determines our feelings, like shame and fear. Thus, Guarino errs in calling shame a virtue, but he is partly right since shame's dependency upon reason makes shame praiseworthy. Now he adopts a hydraulic metaphor, according to which reason "stirs shame but also governs its flow so that it is neither too scarce nor too abundant."(40) It cannot be a virtue because it acts within us in an involuntary, uncontrollable way. In the development of infants, the text states, shame precedes rationality (a remarkable intuition that has only recently gained credence among psychologists).(41) Nor is shame a habit, a position on which Guarino tries to fall back. Ariosto insists that it is something far subtler and more complex. Unlike habits, which become more ingrained over time, shame tends to appear weaker as we get older. For Ariosto/Pocaterra nature is a great artificer. She is compared to a great painter and to a singer, skillful makers who blend gradations "little by little." Shame, then, is a mixed, or blended, thing--"part feeling and part virtue, but a most imperfect virtue at that" ("...la vergogna in parte affetto, in parte virtu; ma virtu imperfettissima, e percio di lode ne in tutto indegna, ne in tutto meritevole" [69]). The final trope used to describe shame is that it is like a medicine which, while not necessarily good itself, may produce good effects.

If the physiology of shame dominates the discussions in the first dialogue, its psychology becomes the focus of the longer and more literary second section. Castello, the "inexpert youth," continues to raise the big questions that Guarino and Ariosto proceed to examine. Ariosto's view invariably prevails here as attention is focused on a number of subtle and perhaps original questions. A few of these will have to serve us as representative of these wide-ranging discussions which, while couched in the familiar vocabulary of humanist moral philosophy, often confront the modern reader with surprising immediacy. The first example is the relationship between praise and shame. Castello states how common it is for people to react with shame when they are praised. If shame is, among other things, the fear of infamy, how then can it be a response to the process of being honored? Ariosto takes Castello through a dialectical process during which it is discovered that (I) honorees fear that spectators will find them arrogant if they believe the honorees take too much pleasure or pride in being praised; and (2) praise can easily shade over into ridicule, and the fear, or anticipation, of that ridicule may elicit shame (ff. [8.sub.5]-[8.sub.7]. What is being worked out here in sixteenth-century terms is the sense of instability experienced by people who must relinquish control or submit passively in circumstances where their low self-esteem is publicly denied, raising the hazard of exposure.(42) For Orazio Ariosto it is this exposure--or the anticipation (fear) of it--that produces shame, for a dishonored person may live privately without experiencing the disquieting physical symptoms of shame even though his conscience may give him much pain.(43) These symptoms may trouble us in private, however, for the imagination sometimes functions to populate our solitudes.(44)

Pocaterra next observes that whether in public or private, the blush may threaten physical health although we are not as likely to die of shame as of joy. Joy, he claims, causes the heart to swell up, as a result of which there may be an outpouring of vital spirits comparable to a serious wound (97-100). Painful feelings such as shame, in contrast, make the heart contract, drawing the vital fluids inward. Even this process is not without risk: "Rather often it happens that the spirits' race to and from the heart is so furious that they cause death; so it is in fear, where as they flee with the blood to the lake of the heart, they so readily crowd the entry passage that, sometimes, they close up the way for respiration and they extinguish themselves, together with the heat of life. So some turn to stone or die for anguish."(45) Ariosto/Pocaterra here seems to be describing either stroke ("turn[ing] to stone") or congestive heart failure leading to a myocardial infarction (heart attack), which, as we now know, is often linked to emotional stress.

Acute though Pocaterra's medical perceptions may be, his psychological observations seem even more so. The Two Dialogues present shame as a natural instinct, present from infancy and, therefore, innate, as basic and elemental a part of our nature as our senses or basic drives. In infancy, though, shame is present only as a "seed." To flourish, it needs nurturing, just as the root and trunk of a tree does if it is to develop branches and leaves. Shame as experienced by adults is therefore the product of socialization and is contingent upon the ways in which natural laws are adapted and interpreted in different environments. To quote Pocaterra's example: "Though we note that there are various things that give birth to infamy in different places, it is nevertheless always the same and common to all. In France there would be no shame for a woman to be kissed; while in Italy the same woman (and she would be foolish to allow it) would make a spectacle of herself."(46)

In a well-nurtured soul, shame never entirely disappears, but it does play a diminishing role over time as we learn to behave more virtuously. It is, therefore, not, as Castello asserts in his flowery classicizing oration in praise of shame, a worthy lifetime companion. Ariosto contributes the corroborating simile that shame should be regarded as a beloved but not as a wife. Over the years, as a man[sic] comes to be governed by reason and brings his affects under control, his need for shame virtually disappears. Even if the virtuous man should fall into an error, "his shame should be manly and magnanimous and not childish; it should be internal rather than apparent."(47) Moreover, such an individual need not be shamed by such "shadows" of infamy as slander and innuendo. In the last half of the second dialogue, Pocaterra's previous shift from physiology to psychology is followed and paralleled by a move from natural to moral philosophy and from Aristotelian to Platonic categories of analysis.(48)

Pocaterra's virtuous public man, who receives extended discussion in the context of the declining need for shame in adulthood, is based on the Platonic virtues. But what is interesting is the way in which he goes beyond this, introducing a new, and perhaps original, concept. What Pocaterra deems essential for the elimination of shame is that the good man must like himself. Pocaterra's belief in the moral and psychological efficacy of an enlightened selfesteem is stressed repeatedly in the second dialogue. He asserts that a wise man would prefer to "like himself, rather than be liked by the multitude."(49) This will enable him to avoid being humiliated by lies and slurs. In particular, men of rank should not concern themselves overly with the ridicule or contempt of inferiors if these negative feelings are based on what Pocaterra calls "shadows." Even if such disparaging rumors escalate into the circles of his peers, the good man need not be shamed, for virtue will out. "The magnanimous man does not live slavishly to somebody else's talent; in fact, he should act according to his own judgment not only without blushing but also without care as long as he remains right and honest." Pocaterra offers one caveat--that we "not come to believe ourselves to be greater than we are."(50) Providing this essential modesty remains part of his character, shame is entirely inappropriate to the virtuous man.

When Erasmus's Folly offered her ironic praise of Philautia, selflove, she challenged the fundamental Christian idea of self-love as a moral defect associated with pride, as well as a sin. Hatred of the self, as expressed in humiliation, self-chastisement, and asceticism, was the path of salvation. But Folly posed this question: "I praie you, can he love any bodie, that loveth not hym selfe?"(51) Pocaterra clearly agrees with this view, even as he considers an accurate sense of one's identity to be as important as self-acceptance for the virtuous person. Thus for a depraved person the absence of shame is "an incorrigible defect," while in a good person the presence of shame is blameworthy (176). In general, shame conduces to virtue in young men and in women for whom other restraints against doing the wrong thing are insufficiently developed.

Pocaterra's views, however innovative they may be regarding other aspects of shame, are totally conventional as regards sexuality. Here a becoming modesty is the goal and sexual shame a fundamental good. Thus he offers without explanation the dictum that children and their fathers should not bathe together, nor should sons-in-law with their fathers-in-law ("Mi ricordo io d'haver letto, gia insegnava a'figliuoi co'lor padri, & a' generi con lor suoceri" [178]). As to women, they are as "weak and dangerous" because of their sex as are children owing to their age. Ariosto flatly states that "he spoke well who said that shame is the fortress in which a woman guards her beauty and her honesty" ("E pero ben disse colui, che la vergogna nella donna era una rocca, nella quale si custodia la sua bellezza, e la sua onesta" [I78-79]). All the speakers agree on this issue. In support of Ariosto, Guarino cites a statement attributed to Aristotle's daughter that the blush of shame painted on a woman's cheek is the most beautiful of all colors. His meaning is unambiguous when he says that shame is the key that opens and closes the treasure of feminine modesty ("la chiave, che apre, e serra il tesoro della femminil pudicizia"), and "whenever a woman chooses to take off the robe of shame" ("spogliarsi la camicia della vergogna"), she is released to pursue "ogni laida e fetida disonesta" --every ugly and stinking indecency (I79). The heightened rhetoric with which the author praises female modesty and raises the spectre of its absence is unmistakable and striking. For Pocaterra women's nature is clearly different from, and inferior to, that of men. Therefore, in his view, nature has provided women with an even more developed sense of shame to help them preserve themselves from disgrace. His compelling proof of nature's superior arrangements in relation to women's physical modesty is that whereas drowned men float to the surface face down, women emerge face up. Why such a circumstance would signify superior modesty on the part of women he does not say, and it is surely not intuitively obvious. (Nor, incidentally, is it true. All of us float face down.)(52)

Divisive or even inflammatory as Pocaterra's remarks on women may appear to us, they would have elicited little dissent from Pocaterra's contemporaries, who regarded such archetypical figures as Lucretia and the Virgin Mary as emblems of female excellence. To a sixteenth-century reader, then, this discussion of shame would not have appeared incongruous as an introduction to the concluding arguments of the book, which stress the unity and bonding of humankind, including women. Here a lyrical and idealistic passage argues for increasing harmony among all peoples. To facilitate the process, virtuous people may feel shame for the shortcomings of others, thus helping them to perfect themselves.(53) This referred shame is related to the sense of humility people may feel in the presence of those whom they esteem and wish to please. The tongue-tied lover, the awed subject, the speechless orator--all share a common humiliation deriving from an excessive desire to please a beloved or venerated other.(54) Such disproportionate shame wreaks havoc in personal relationships and among the peoples of the world. Unity and harmony depend on understanding; understanding comes from communication; and rational communication cannot take place at the poles of the shame-pride axis, the shame-guilt axis, or the shame-fear axis.(55)

For Pocaterra the conditions productive of mental health on the individual and collective levels are one and the same. Everyone has a primary responsibility to him- or herself: "In the end, honor and infamy belong to those who are responsible for them" ("Voglio tutavia, che sappiate che alla fine l'honore e la infamia e di chi la si fa" [208]). At the same time, we all share a measure of responsibility for each other--and for one another's honor and shame. Whether applied to the intricacies of daily life or to the complexities of international affairs from the conquest of Mexico to the Treaty of Versailles and beyond, most of Dr. Pocaterra's prescriptions still ring true.

THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY 

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-----. "Burle, generi e potere: i Discorsi di Annibale Romei." Schifanoia 2 (1986): 9-21.

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-----. "What the World Might Have Been Like If Pocaterra Had Not Been Ignored." Unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Durham, NC, April 12, 1991.

-----. Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex and the Birth of the Self. New York, 1992.

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(1)Benedict, 223.

(2)Dodds, 28ff.

(3)Lloyd-Jones, 1-28.

(4)Burton, 261-63, "shame and disgrace causes." Burton (1623) provides evidence as to the perceived ineffectuality of criminal punition, social stigmatization, and psychological pressures in restraining deviant behavior. His lament could be dismissed as one more jeremiad from the ranks of the privileged if it did not conform to a comprehensive and detailed understanding of extralegal behavior in early modern England. Some extreme cases of official attempts at repression of disapproved acts are cited and analyzed in Boose, 179-213.

(5)Nathanson, [1987.sup.1], 34, reflects on a study of shame reactions in the four-month-old child: "Our name for the happy confluence of excitement or joy and the experience of personal efficacy is pride, which by its nature is always linked to the emotion shame in reciprocal fashion.... Pride is intrinsically linked to a concept of self. Conversely, it seems likely that shame affect (in addition to the accretion of the hiding behavior now embedded in the cessation of affective communication) is used by the organism to reduce the interest-excitement associated with the infant's personal activity, and thus adds the atoms of self and failure to the steadily building molecule of shame emotion." Later (38-39) the author sees shame and pride reactions as closely linked to issues of excretory control during the second year of life. An amplified version of his views may be found in Nathanson, [1987.sup.2], 183-204, with some remarkable observations on the function of sports in American society and their functional relationship to theater in earlier cultures. See also Stern (1985) and the fundamental essay by Tomkins (1987), an up-to-date recapitulation of the findings first advanced in 1961-62 by the founder of affect theory.

(6)Both Peristiany and Campbell demonstrate the continuity of these polarities in village and rural life over a period of two millennia. Pocaterra's Dialogues are to some degree the product of a society that shares the moral and ethical structures and commitments of those studied by Peristiany and other historical anthropologists of the Mediterranean region.

(7)See Spevack, 1119-20. As one might expect, shame occurs most frequently in Shakespearean contexts where the emotion is crucial to the action, as in Lucrece (31 times) and some of the histories (the Henry VI trilogy has 41 occurrences). There are several meanings, which can be contextually determined, including sexual shame; public embarrassment for weakness, incompetence, or wrongdoing; stigma of deviance as embodied in marginal social behavior, e.g., scolding, drunkenness; and an intolerable affront to the hero's pride. One might also note the public shaming of a braggart, like that of Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well, where the strategy of humiliation would have found an appreciative audience. Some suggestive interpretations, especially regarding Lucrece, appear in Fineman.

(8)McKeon, bk. 4, ch. 9 (1128b, ll.10-35).

(9)See Galen, 45: "All men who have entered public life try to be moderate in all their actions.... When those men have done some wrong and are caught, they are not ashamed of themselves, but that others have found them out. But you must be ashamed of yourself, and pay special heed to him who says: 'Of all things, be most/ashamed of yourself.'" According to Harkins, Galen is quoting the Carmen Aureum.

(10)Pliny, 11:57, 157. This observation makes its way into folklore, as in the Welsh proverb "The cheek hides not the heart's affliction," quoted by Elliott as originally deriving from Rhys, 1: 634.

(11)Inferno, 17:79-125. Dante is ordered to be strong and bold and to mount the beast. Singleton renders the poet's initial reaction (ll. 85-90) thus: "As one who has the shivering-fit of the quartan so near that his nails are already pale, and he trembles all over at the mere sight of shade, such I became at these words of his; but shame rebuked me, which makes a servant brave in the presence of a good master."

(12)Inf., 30:133-35. Unless otherwise noted, translations are the author's.

(13)Nathanson, 1989. The author cites Darwin's recognition that shame manifests itself in "confusion of mind": "Persons in this condition lose their presence of mind, and utter singularly inappropriate remarks. They are often much distressed, stammer, and make awkward movements or strange grimaces." The process may also work in reverse. As Goffman, 97-112, noted, commission of a "situational impropriety" in everyday social interaction will normally produce embarrassment and the physiological manifestations of shame.

(14)Cavell, 278, discusses the uses of shame in King Lear, and sees it as "the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at, the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces. Guilt is different; there the reflex is to avoid discovery. As long as no one knows what you have done, you are safe; or your conscience will press you to confess it and accept punishment. Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion than guilt, as inescapable as the possession of a body, the first object of shame."

(15)Inf., 30:142-48.

(16)Inf., 32:34.

(17)In a few stanzas, Dante demonstrates an encyclopedic command of facial and ocular expression. These blushing souls avert their faces, a natural symbol of shame ("Ognuna in giu tenea volta la faccia" [l. 37]). Addressing two of them who were closely pressed together, Dante causes them to turn their faces towards him, whereupon "their eyes, which before were moist only within, welled up with tears, which ran down over the lips, and the frost bound each to each and locked them even tighter" (ll. 46-48). One of them, now looking down again, begins his reply to Dante's interrogative with the words "Perche cotanto in noi ti specchi," which Singleton renders "Why do you gaze so much on us?" Their shame and their misery seem absolute and coterminous; both are mediated through the face and the eyes. The function of the gaze in literature and psychoanalysis has attracted much recent attention, but the starting point remains Starobinski. Spenser makes much of the gaze, according to Krier, 157-63, dealing with "shamefastness" (shamefacedness). A recent essay on the representation of women's shame by male artists is Hults.

(18)Purg., 11:121-42.

(19)Machiavelli, 336 (Disc. 3.6:35). The text reads: "Ammazzarono, alcuni congiurati Forlivesi, il conte Girolamo loro signore, presono la moglie ed i suoi figliuoli che erano piccoli, e non parendo loro potere vivere sicuri se non si insignorivano della fortezza e non volendo il castellano darla loro, Madonna Caterina (che cosi si chiamava la contessa) promise ai congiurati, che se la lasciavano ertrare in quella, di farla consegnare loro, e che ritenessono a presso di loro i suoi figliuoli per istatichi. Costoro sotto questa fede ve la lasciarono entrare; la quale come fu dentro, dalle mura rimprovero loro la morte del marito e minacciogli d'ogni qualita di vendetta. E per mostrare che de'suoi figliuoli non si curava, mostro loro le membra genitali, dicendo che aveva ancora il modo a rifarne. Cosi costoro, scarsi di consiglio e tardi avvedutisi del loro errore, con uno perpetuo esilio patirono pene della poca prudenza loro."

(20)E.g., Breisach, 103: "The actual events do not yield such a colorful story," but this too is unproven. If the anecdote is a piece of Machiavellian embroidery, its design bristles with symbolic aptness. Caterina performs this humiliating sexual taunt as part of her effort to resist both the rape of her city and, in all likelihood, herself and many other women of Forli. The violent breaching of city walls, in this period as in the ancient world, often signified an interruption in the legitimate transmission of paternity, causing shame on both the political and familial levels. Thus, rather than accepting such shame, she induces the would-be conquerors by testing their willingness to kill her sons. In this situation they face humiliation however they choose to respond.

(21)Hexter, 75-81.

(22)In imaginative writing shame was often personified. In a tradition going back to Hesiod and elaborated in Prudentius's Psychomachia, the virtue set in opposition to libido is pudicitia, i.e., sexual shame, the form of modesty which leads men, and especially women, to cover up what sixteenth-century writers conventionally call the "shameful parts." This is one pagan analogue of the Tree of Knowledge. Prudentius's pudicitia is resurrected as Shamefastnesse in Faerie Queene, bk. 2. Catherine Belsey kindly informs me that Worldly Shame appears in the 1550s interlude Nice Wanton to tell Xantippe that her daughter has died of the pox and her son has been hanged because she failed to discipline them in youth. He (for this is a rare male embodiment) adds that people will taunt and mock (i.e., shame) her, blaming her for these deaths. She faints--Pocaterra would recognize this as a fear reaction--and Worldly Shame leaves so that he will not be seen and blamed for her death. On reviving, she thinks of suicide.

Similarly, a (presumably male) character named Shame appears in Thomas Preston's play Cambises, printed in 1569, to reveal "the odious facts and shameless deeds" of King Cambises. "As Fame doth sound the royal trump of worthy men and trim,/ So Shame doth blow with strained blast the trump of shame on him." (Courtesy of Alan Dessen.) The use of shaming rites in English Renaissance drama would bear investigation. Gail Kern Paster discussed corporeal aspects of the topic, especially relating to women in her recently published book, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England.

(23)Vives, 3:508-14; Norena, 199-200.

(24)Referred to variously in the literature as Antonio Luiz or Luis and Antonius Ludovicus, the author is known principally for this book. Several other works are listed by the same author in Anselmo; also Jochers, 4:2584.

(25)There are quite a few of these sixteenth-century manuals of popular semiotics. Armed with a few of them, readers could ascertain the moral and emotional condition of anyone they happened to see. Not all of this took place on the level of parlor games, as we know from the survival of physiognomical arguments into late nineteenth-century historiography, social theory, and even criminology. See, for example, Conclito; Carpentieri da Forli; Ianus Cornarius; an anonymous Physiognomy und Chiromancy (Augsburg, 1544); and the later, influential work of Porta. An emblem of Alciatus, "In pudoris statuam," in the anonymous Emblemata manifests a similar interest in the facial expression of shame.

(26)Texts and modernized musical settings are in Newcomb, 208-20.

(27)Superbi, 85. This source claims that Pocaterra was buried in the church of San Francesco. Guarino's Compendio (1621) states, however, that Pocaterra was interred in the family tomb on the left-hand side of the Corpus Christi altar in the Cathedral of Ferrara. This is probably correct. Guarino adds: "Annibale giovine d'alta Filosofia, celebrato di Torquato Tasso in un Dialogo del giuco nelle sue rime registrato. Fu leggiadrissimi Poeta, leggendosi di lui rare composizioni, ed in particolare, un Dialogo della vergogna ingegnosissimo." Later Ferrarese biographical editors such as Baruffaldi (1698) and Crescimbeni (1730) draw on these works. Borsatti, 211, adds several details that I have not been able to corroborate, namely, that Pocaterra wrote another Italian dialogue, De erubescentia Hannibal, and left some remarkable lectures on Aristotle's De anima. Borsatti implies that the latter works remained unpublished. Ughi, 116, states that Pocaterra was a student of Antonio Montecatini's and was awarded professional rank in 1585, at the age of twenty-three.

(28)Printed in small octavo by Ferrara's leading publisher, Benedetto Mammarelli, Due dialogi della vergogna does not appear ever to have been reprinted or translated. Yet it cannot be considered a particularly rare book, despite an enthusiastic bookseller's notation in the Houghton Library copy describing it as "very rare." Seven copies are recorded in American libraries, and an eighth is known to be in private hands. Dr. Piero Alongi has made an English translation of the dialogues, which Nathanson and I are currently preparing for publication in an annotated edition.

(29)To suggest that the dialogue form in this case may have served more to alienate than to attract readers is to challenge, albeit mildly, the convincing general theory advanced by Jon R. Snyder, who notes the popularity of the genre in precisely this period (viii). See also Feroni; Jones-Davies; Murphy; and Wilson.

Pocaterra may have been attracted to the form both because of its general appeal to contemporary literary taste, its specific prominence in the Ferrarese context (where it received both theoretical attention and much practical application [q.v. Snyder]), and its utility as a way of advancing ideas free of direct authorial attribution. However, the "scene of speaking" which Pocaterra evoked--the courtly circle of Alfonso II d'Este--seems to target humanistically-educated aristocrats as its natural audience, while the First Book deals with physiological questions more appropriate to physicians. They, on the other hand, may have been unimpressed by the artifice of the form. The author, who in his own work sought to bridge these two cultures (which admittedly had only begun to diverge), would likely have been unaware of the possible disadvantages of his literary strategy. In any case, Pocaterra's untimely death was, I believe, the most significant element in the book's lack of impact. On the implications of its echoing silence, see Nathanson, 1991.

(30)Venturini, 9-84.

(31)This Alessandro Guarino should not be confused with the well-known poet and courtier of the same name who was Baptista Guarino's son and served as secretary to both Alfonso I and Ercole II d'Este. Pocaterra's Alessandro was the son of a grandnephew of his namesake. He had a law degree, was esteemed as a man of letters, and served Duke Alfonso II in various capacities, including ambassador to the Medici court. His career is summarized by Ughi, 31-32.

(32)Gundersheimer, 1986, documents several rituals of humiliation at the Ferrarese court.

(33)Elias, chs. 4-5.

(34)Pocaterra, f.A[[I].sup.v]: "...mal di vero par che si convenghino ragionamenti di vergogna a Principe, che in ogni eta avanzando l'eta, e sempre heroicamente adoperando, camino lungi da ogni occasion di vergognarsi."

(35)Ibid., f. A3: "La vergogna al fine e honesta cosa, e se non e virtu, e almeno alla virtu molto vicina, e simile.

(36)Ibid., f. A3: "...non havendo ella mai commesso diffetto alcuno, per cagion del quale possa haver havuto sperienza, o contezza della vergogna, non le dovria esser discaro, I'haverne notitia in qualche parte da i miei scritti, col mezzo de'quali potra veder nel rossore altrui la sua propria lucida candidezza."

(37)Ibid., 40: "Due sono i mali, che sovra gli altri sono a gli occhi nostri spaventevoli, morte, ed infamia. hora se la nostra natura fatta accorta dal senso, o dalla ragione, che stanno quasi in alta torre a spiare cio che di bene, o di male ci si appressa, sente farsi allo'ncontro qualche male, insidiatore di nostra salute; percioche non puo occuparci la morte prima che sia espugnata la rocca del cuore, in cui siede principalmente la vita: la natura, dico, che prima stavasi per tutte le parti del corpo distesa a far suoi uffici intenta, corre nel profondo cuore; accioche ivi raccolte, & unite tutte sue forze, e fatta sopra se stessa vigorosa, meglio dall'insidie de'nemici la possa diffendere."

(38)Ibid., 40-41: "Ma se allo'ncontro la natura s'accorge, il detrimento, el'offesa esser un bene esterno, com'e I'honore, e percio non haver luogo la difesa del cuore; ivi non si ferma; ma quasi d'un balzo risalta di fuori, per far riparo al danno vegnente: e cio s'argomenta di fare in quel modo migliore; che puo, e che sa, coprendo il volto, con intentione di coprir anche I'anima peccatrice d'un purpureo velo di sangue. e non e maraviglia; perche I'ascondersi, il coprirsi e natural proprieta di quello affetto."

(39)Ibid., 41: "...spesse fiate coloro, i quali cono tocchi da vergogna; non potendo in altro modo celarsi, pongonsi le mani dinanzi al viso, e chinano gli occhi; quasi vogliono tutto il volto sotto a'cigli nascondere." The outward manifestations of shame have not changed over time and are now thought by some to be innate. Note Nathanson's remarks in [1987.sup.1], 252: "Of course it is not possible to grow up without having experienced the affect shame. It must be basic to the human condition, else how do we explain the fact that it has its own neurological pathway leading to the blush? ...Shame is about eye contact. We lower our eyes, avert our gaze when embarrassed. This certainly interrupts whatever had been going on between the participants.... The eyes are the window of the brain, and in the language of primary process, we may feel people can look in on our thoughts almost as well as we can see out." Pocaterra was expressing the identical view in sixteenth-century language; he understood the selfprotective role of the blush and the averted gaze, although his metaphors did not include neurological pathways.

(40)Ibid., 61-62. The discussion has to do with normal, or socially appropriate, expressions of shame. Pocaterra writes elsewhere of exaggerated, or what we might call pathological, defects or excesses of shame.

(41)According to Tomkins, 139ff., affect is primarily facial behavior, and humans are possessed of an affect system that is innate but also "capable of being instigated by learned stimuli and responses." He identifies nine major affects, three of which are positive and six negative. In order to appreciate fully the elegance and accuracy of Pocaterra's ideas, it is useful to bear in mind Tomkins's typology:

The positive affects are as follows: first, interest or excitement, in which we observe that the eyebrows are down and the stare tracking an object or fixed on it; second, enjoyment or joy, the smiling response; third, surprise or startle, with eyebrows raised and eyes blinking.

The negative affects are the following: first, distress or anguish, the crying response; second, fear or terror, in which the eyes may be frozen open in a fixed stare or moving away from the dreaded object to the side, the skin pale, cold, sweating, and trembling, and the hair erect; third, shame or humiliation, with eyes and head lowered; fourth, dissmell, with the upper lip raised; fifth, disgust, with the lower lip lowered and protruded; sixth, anger or rage, with a frown, clenched jaw, and red face.

Pocaterra comments extensively on both fear and anger but has little to say about the other affects.

(42)Many people, including the present writer, have experienced acute embarrassment and discomfort in situations designed to make them fell pride in accomplishments imputed to them by others. A famous artist told me that he was seated next to a celebrated poet on a platform where both were awaiting the bestowal of honorary degrees. In the course of their conversation, each revealed to the other that he found the occasion minimally tolerable only because of having taken a significant dose of some calming medication.

(43)See Nathanson, [1987.sup.2], 188: "In adult life pride is viewed with suspicion. Linked with vanity, foolishness, weakness, indeed becoming almost a synonym for narcissism, adult pride is dangerously close to the very shame that is supposed to be its opposite. The clue is in the moment of self-consciousness inherent in the experience of pride. I suspect that by the time we have achieved adult status there is much we wish to hide from ourselves as well as others. Any opening of the self to view carries with it the risk of unwanted exposure and unpredictable shame [emphasis mine]."

(44)Morrison, 220-21, elaborates on this point, first noticed by Pocaterra, 94-96, pointing out that shame can be felt when we are alone "in the deepest woods" and in the "most deserted and remote solitudes"; for, he notes, "Do we not always have our selves with us?" Morrison, using the methods of Heinz Kohut, seeks to complement Nathanson's emphasis on shame in interpersonal relations by demonstrating that shame does "not require the presence of an external person, but...emphasizes rather the eye of the self gazing inward." Pocaterra's recognition of shame not merely recalled but actually experienced in solitude broadly anticipates Morrison's description of the defective self that has internalized autonomously triggered feelings of shame.

(45)Pocaterra, 111: "Ma egli adivien non rade volte, che il corso, il quali essi [gli spiriti] prendono o dentro o fuori del cuore, sia cosi furioso, che sieno a lor medesimi di morte caghione: sicome e nel timore: nel quale fuggendo essi col sangue nel lago del cuore, si fattamente si premono in su; 'entrata, che chiudono talhora il varco in guisa alla respiratione, che estinguono se stessi, col calor della vita insieme."

(46)Ibid., 125: "Ben varie sono le cose, che partoriscono la'nfamia, in diversi luoghi; ma ella e nondimeno sempre lamedesima, e sta salda per tutto. In Francia non sarebbe vergogna a una donna I'esser baciata: la medesima in Italia (ben sciocca di vero in questa parte), verrebbene mostrata a lito...non fu mai luogo, ne tempo, ne gente niuna, che non conscesse honore, ed infamia di qualche sorte." The choice of a female example here reflects what appears to be an unconscious misogyny in the form of a view that shame (not just the conventionl pudor but also vergogna) is more appropriate to women than men.

(47)Ibid., 155: "Ben vi dico, che incappando I'huomo in qualche errore, e dovendosi pur vergognare; la vergogna su dovrebbe esser magnanima, e virile, e non fanciullesca, e piu tosto interna, che appaente...la somma tuttavia della verita secondo me e questa; che niuna sorte di vergogna in niun modo mai si conviene al virtuoso; imperoche s'egli pecca, gia non e pit virtuoso."

(48)Without citing Plato, Pocaterra simply begins to appropriate the Platonic vocabulary, as the emphasis on vitue and the dismissal of mistaken impressions as "shadows" demonstrates. See esp 156ff.

(49)Pocaterra, 164: "Io mi risolvo a dire cosi in universale, che'l savio huomo, e da bene, ama meglio semprem ai di piacer'a se stesso, che alla multitudine." He drives home this defense of the importance of self-esteem in comparison to popular opinion by citing Petrarch's Triumph of Death, 2:51-53: "Mentre al volgo dietro vai / & a I'opinion sua cieca, e dura, / Esser felice non puoi tu gia mai."

(50)Pocaterra, 171: "Sol una cosa e di grandissima consideratione in questo caso; che noi non c'inganniamo, dandoci ad intendere d'esser da molto piu, che non siamo; nel qual'errore par che non pochi si lascino volontier trasportare."

(51)Erasmus, ME, 35; cited by Kaser, 69.

(52)Information supplied by the Coroner's Office of the City of Philadelphia, via Donald L. Nathanson, M.D.

(53)Compare Tomkins, 154: "I may feel ashamed because you should feel ashamed but do not."

(54)Pocaterra, 193-99. Here Pocaterra perceives a connection between shame and shyness, the exaggerated effects of which can impede human relations. See also Tomkins, 143: "Discouragement, shyness, shame, and guilt are identical as affects, though not so experienced.... Shyness is about strangeness of the other; guilt is about moral transgression; shame is about inferiority; discouragement is about temporary defeat"; and 153: "Shame is experienced as shyness when one wishes to be intimate with the other but also feels some impediment to immediate intimacy. That impediment may be located in the self, the other, or in the dyad, or in a third party who intrudes."

(55)Here again Pocaterrais in harmony with current affect theory and recent psychoanalytic discussions of shame, seen as an inhibitor of pride, joy, openness, eye-contact, reduction of interest or joy." And Nathanson, [1987.sup.2], 192: "The longer we have been distressed and the more intense has been this distress, the more joy we will experience when this distress has been reduced."