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Thomas Scheff: The Repression of Shame

Posted on by Jason Hughes

Below is a link that Thomas Scheff has asked to be posted on the Elias blog. Tom plans to present the paper at the Elias Collected Works conference in June 2014.
The abstract is as follows:

This essay proposes that there is a taboo on shame in modern societies that interferes with the objective study of this emotion. The taboo is based on repression, the hiding of information at first from others, then from self. My own difficulty in recognizing shame as a field of study is described. Some examples of studies that seem unaware that their topic is shame (under an alternative name) are discussed.

Thomas Sheff, Shame