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