Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 35:13–39, 2015

Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver

ISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 online
DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2014.957126

Mortal Wound, Shame, and Tragic Search: Reflections on

Tragic Experience and Tragic Conflicts in History,
Literature, and Psychotherapy

Léon Wurmser, M.D., Ph.D.

We can distinguish between a) the original concepts of tragedy as a particularly influential form of
drama, culminating in extreme suffering; b) the tragic compassion, terror, and pathos, shudder and
awe evoked in the audience; c) the tragic vision of life and world as a form of value philosophy stress-
ing the unsolvable nature of some basic conflicts and their radical, even absolute nature; d) the tragic
conflict described as an exemplary phenomenon in history, i.e. as value destruction, specifically as
the dialectical turning of a high value into destruction; e) the popular overextension of the term used
for any swift, unexpected disaster; and, finally, f) the tragic experience as a central psychopatholog-
ical phenomenon, a complex of archaic conflicts, images and events, as exemplified by the tragic
character. The tragic fate is a heroic fight against catastrophe, death and inner deadness, which
fails.
Specifically, the article studies a fourfold layering of the dynamics of tragedy (of conflict and
trauma): 1. The conflict of reason, order and measure against various forms of incomprehensible com-
pulsion or necessity from within or from without. 2. This leads to the violation of some basic order of
existence and the need for expiation for that guilt. The overriding conflict is that of power, honor, and
possession as absolute values against love, belonging and community commitments. Shame versus
guilt is the tragic dilemma par excellence. 3. All the conflicts express an absoluteness and global
nature of all value pursuits by the protagonists which makes them principally irreconcilable; it is
the core of hubris and comes closest to what Aristotle refers to as Hamartía. This stands in sharpest
conflict with nature’s measure and limitations and society’s law and order as mostly represented by
the chorus. 4. The wish to violate the most basic limitations and boundaries is rooted in the “mortal
wound” or trauma and the desperate search for some healing. This image of the “mortal wound at the
core of being” stands for “primary pain”, “primary shame”, and “primary anxiety” as the essence of
the tragic dimension of human existence.
An analysis of shame is the focus of the second part of the article.

Léon Wurmser, M.D., Ph.D. h.c. (Humboldt University, Berlin), was clinical professor of psychiatry at University of
Maryland and University of West Virginia, Charleston; is training and supervising analyst for the Contemporary Freudian
Society, in private practice in Towson, and regularly teaches in Europe. His major works include: The Hidden Dimension,
The Mask of Shame, The Power of the Inner Judge, Torment me, but don’t abandon me!; with Heidrun Jarass: Jealousy
and Envy, “Nothing Good is Allowed to Stand,” Shame and the Evil Eye.
14 LÉON WURMSER

CONFLICT AND TRAUMA IN TRAGEDY AND TRAGIC EXPERIENCE

Layers of Conflict in Tragedy

One of the premises of the psychoanalytic approach to culture and literature consists of the
assumption that much that would otherwise appear baffling and incomprehensible can be
understood much better if one sees it as reflecting inner reality, as an expression of forces within.
More precisely, outer reality has shaped them, but it is a steady back and forth of inside and
outside forces and structures that can give psychoanalysts much deeper insights than other, more
outside directed approaches alone. This holds particularly true for religion and mythology. In the
following I take this premise for granted.
A second premise is that inner conflict, i.e., that the mental processes incessantly move in
polarities and clashing motivations, is a core paradigm that helps to understand very much of that
inner reality. What, then, are the various layers of conflict in tragedy, in tragic experience, and in
tragic vision?
1. We are immediately struck by one conflict that seems to lead: that of reason,_order, and
measure pitted against various forms of incomprehensible compulsion or necessity, either forces
of irrational drives from within, the compelling vehemence of anarchy, or, conversely, of a seem-
ingly irresistible force of fate from without, from some inscrutably malignant deity. Such double
compulsion from within and without inexplicably overrules any judgment, any ability to choose,
any inner freedom of reason. “It was Apollo, friends, Apollo, that brought this bitterness, my
sorrows to completion. But the hand that struck me was none but my own (autócheir)” (Oidipous
Tyrannos, vv. 1329–1333; similarly in Antigone: “autourgō cherí”, v. 52), or “troubles hurt the
most when they are self-inflicted (authaíretoi)” (v. 1231), more accurately: self-chosen. The cho-
rus states in Antigone: “Fate has terrible power (ha moiridía tis dýnasis deiná). You cannot escape
it by wealth or war. No fort will keep it out, no ships outrun it” (pp. 951–955). One hears, espe-
cially from Aristotle (“Ananke;” 1927), Schiller (“Zwang”), and Scheler (“Unentrinnbarkeit”),
about the inevitability, the compelling necessity from the outside (Fate) or inside (conscience,
character, drives).
Put somewhat differently, it is the self that acts, and yet, at the same time, it is not the self that
acts; it is, as in the Colonous tragedy, done by will power (hekón), but also involuntarily (ákon):
“I suffered them, by force, against my will (has ego talas enenkon akon)” (v. 963/4)—something
analysts are clinically daily confronted with. “Erexas! You sinned,” says the chorus. “Ouk érexa!
I did not sin,” Oedipus replies. “Authaíreton oudén. It was not self chosen” (OC, v. 539, v. 523).
Even the word “á-idris, not knowing, unconscious” is used (v. 548). The same doubleness of
agency toward the end of Antigone appears in Creon’s words, referring to the suicides of his son
and wife, after Antigone’s execution: “This is my guilt, all mine” (aitían . . . échon; v. 13121),
parallel to this: “It was a god who struck me (theós . . . m’ . . . épaisen), who has weighted my
head with disaster; he drove me to wild strange ways, his heavy heel on my joy” (vv. 1272–1275).
“I did not want to kill you!” (se t’ouch hekón katékanon; v. 1340).
The forces from the depth and the forces of fatal judgment clash with the rational self, the
representative of harmony, control, and reconciliation. In tragedy, this force of measure and bal-
ance is mostly represented by the chorus, whereas the forces of limit-breaking absoluteness are
embodied by the protagonists. The crucial function of the Chorus shines up in its exhortation at
the end of Oedipus at Colonous: “Medén ágan—Nothing too much!” (v. 695).
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 15

In another metaphor, the demonic forces of Ananke crash the gates of inner freedom and
invade and defeat the forces of free choice. This is, of course, the classical neurotic conflict
where the psychoanalytic journey of discovery started. What gives this conflict its tragic air is the
wish to know, to avoid, to extricate oneself, and the radical impossibility to do so—the enforced
helplessness and ignorance (ágnoia).
Some authors (e.g., Steiner, 1961, and Muschg, 1948) see this conflict—the one between rea-
son and order (the ego) versus the demonic forces of irrationality breaking in from without or
within—as the tragic conflict per se. I think it is an indispensable part of the tragic experience,
this factor of inner compulsion that, indeed, has to clash with the laws of nature or society, thus
with external necessity. Indeed, if one looks over all the tragedies this factor of overriding, unmit-
igated compulsion is striking, and I believe Schiller (1791, 1792) was right when he said that this
compulsion has to be viewed as primarily intrapsychic.
In the history of the concept of tragedy, the accent has shifted entirely from external Ananke
to internal Ananke, from inexorable Fate, allotted by the gods (Moira, or in the previous quote,
Apollon), to the pivotal role of internal compulsion that has become for analysts, indeed, the
lodestone of psychopathology: The frightening intensity of this inner tragic compulsion, its rock-
like resistance and immutability, the helplessness of the ego about diverting and channeling its
vehemence into less destructive paths, are striking in these patients.
2. Yet, there is now a decisive specification: The conflict between the forces of order and
measure, of law and reason against the demonic powers from within and from the gods converges
into the issues of sin and punishment: the violation of some basic order of existence and the
need for expiation for that. With this specification, condemnation and chastisement of a radical
vehemence and violence become central. That violation of the basic order of Being has to be
rectified, and this can be done only by some form of brutal, usually murderous punishment. That
means that the figure of what people know throughout human history, from Egypt, the Bible, and
tragedy, as well as with some hints in Confucius and Lao Tzu, as some form of inner judge or
metaphysical tribunal is paramount. The figure is represented by the gods or by the God, most
importantly in tragedy, of course, the Delphic Apollo.
Thus this layer is that of the absolutist, even totalitarian nature of the inner judge, particularly
evident in tragic guilt and tragic shame, as expressions of the archaic superego. They appear often
in external, always also in a crushing internal form. Most of the Gods are clear representations
of such an archaic superego, the God of exclusive monotheism (Assmann 2003, 2006; Wurmser,
2012) just as much as Zeus and Apollo of Greek tragedy.
In the literary works, the punishment and humiliation usually comes from without, though very
often, as Freud described, directly provoked from within—“those wrecked by success” (1916)
and in “the negative therapeutic reaction” (1918, 1923, 1924, 1937).
This second layer is really a double, entwined conflict: (a) the wish for narcissistic splendor
and the fear of humiliation—the shame conflict, and (b) the wish to be related to the all-important
(overvalued) object and the violation of its rights (the guilt conflict). The avoidance of shame
equals incurring guilt, and vice versa—the conflict between the sense of shame about weakness
and the sense of guilt about violating the rights of others. This shame–guilt dilemma, in a most
radical, global form, seems to me indispensable for the tragic experience and makes its appear-
ance in one form or another in most great tragedy. A careful analysis can probably document it in
most tragedy, as well as in the tragic entanglements of analysts’ patients and of nations in history.
16 LÉON WURMSER

As a matter of fact, in most of clinical cases its understanding can be the key to much crucial
insight.
This tragic dilemma between avoidance of shame by insisting on honor and prestige and the
incurrence of guilt by trampling on the rights of others is not merely a frequent individual occur-
rence, but a conflict dominating much of explicit history: Antigone’s honor becomes Creon’s
shame (and vice versa); honor becomes guilt; one’s own face is supposedly saved by mutilating
the body of the other; one’s own self-esteem is rescued by the extermination of the other who is
perceived as a threat to one’s strength or, more deeply, one’s identity.
But what do these affects of overriding shame and guilt really reflect? They express not only
mutually incompatible forces, but irreconcilable commitments, loyalties, and responsibilities to
values of high (subjective and often objective) dignity.
Among the tragedies, it is probably the drama of Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter, which
describes the double dialectic of shame and guilt on both sides of the conflict in the most gripping
way (Wurmser, 1978, p. 253).
Antigone decides, against the tyrant Creon’s (her uncle’s) decree, to render to her traitor
brother Polyneices the honor of the burial rites, instead of his body’s exposure to the devour-
ing dogs and birds, “a ghastly sight of shame (aikisthén t’ideı̄n)” (vv. 205/6). She considers
herself without guilt (or shame): “For me, who is going to do this, it’s noble to die; for I owe a
longer allegiance to the dead than to the living. . . . I shall suffer nothing as great as dying without
honor (ou kalōs thaneı̄n)” (vv. 75/76, 96/97). Defiantly she transgresses manmade laws to honor
“the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws (ágrapta kasphalē theōn nómima).” For Creon, however,
her deed is both a “grave guilt” and a shame for acting apart from “all these Thebans” and of
“rendering a grace” to the traitor. Thus, she accepts (external) guilt of breaking Creon’s law to
not be guilty of breaking the laws of the Gods (or of what modern man would call her inner laws).
She accepts the shame of being an outlaw in state and community to not partake in the shame of
dishonoring her dead brother and, thus, her family value.
Creon, however, sees in this attitude hubris, arrogant pride:
These rigid spirits are the first to fall. . . . Slave to his neighbor, who can think of pride? This girl
was expert in her insolence (hybrízein) when she broke bounds beyond established law. Once she had
done it, insolence (hybris) the second, to boast her doing, and to laugh in it. I am no man and she the
man instead if she can have this conquest without pain. [vv. 480–485]

Yet Antigone accuses him of the same arrogance: “And if you think my acts are foolishness,
the foolishness may be in a fool’s eyes” (v. 469/470). Still, he maintains his guilt-ridden stance
of strength to avoid the shame of weakness: “So I must guard the men who yield to order, not let
myself be beaten by a woman. Better, if it must happen, that a man should overset me. I won’t
be called weaker than womankind” (vv. 677–681). “While I live, no woman will rule me” (v.
525). Yet, he is not merely foolishly arrogant in his insistence on manly strength, but at the same
time, he also defends a high value: “law and order” maintain state and society: “There is no
greater wrong than disobedience (anarchía). This ruins cities, this tears down our homes” (vv.
672/673) It is obedience (peitharchía) that saves everybody, that protects the community as a
whole (v. 676). Thus, it is value against value in dramatic conflict. Yet such power, in its abso-
luteness, turns into a great evil that stands in opposition (“in sheer oppugnancy” in Shakespeare’s
word) to what Antigone proclaims: love and belonging, in the famous word: “I was born not to
share in hatred but in love—oútoi synéchthein, allá symphileı̄n éphyn” (v. 523). I believe this is
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 17

ultimately the great inner polarity, the overriding inner conflict of these three and perhaps of all
tragedies: power, honor, and possession as absolute values against love and community as over-
riding commitments. Or, put differently, the leading feelings of shame, jealousy and envy stand
against those of compassion, solidarity, and the acceptance of measure.
Creon’s own son, Haemon, tries to shake him in his false pride: “Do not have one mind, and
one alone that only your opinion can be right. . . . A man, though wise, should never be ashamed
of learning more, and must unbend his mind” (vv. 705/706, 710/711). Stubbornly avoiding
humiliation and shame, eventually Creon is crushed by guilt for having, by his arrogant pride,
brought death to his whole family.
3. The third layer is the extreme nature of all these value pursuits. In the words of E. Bobrick
(2015, p. 42; this issue): “Both (protagonists in Antigone) suffer from an excess of being right,”
and it is this absoluteness that has to lead to the self-isolation and destruction of community she
talks about: “More than anything, self-isolation from a sense of having to do the right thing is the
characteristic of a tragic hero. Doing the right thing usually satisfies the hero’s sense of honor,
but tends to destroy his or her philoi” (p. 41), she centrally states. “She has isolated herself in the
name of justice, divine or civic [Antigone vs. Creon], and a code of class behavior,” with such
huge acts of defiance that “she cannot reach anyone and no one can reach her” (p. 44). Thus, the
very pursuit of justice is perverted: “Antigone enacts the failure of justice over the conflicting
demands of religious law and civic law” (p. 40).
One may recognize, as in all Greek tragedies, in both protagonists a double conflict, i.e., one
between extreme stands for two values, resulting in double defeat: In Creon it is an overriding
and stubborn emphasis on honor, pride, and power; thus he tries to avoid the curse of shame;
it is the shame–pride conflict. Yet ineluctably, he thereby transgresses the laws of the ethical
order: that of commitment to the integrity of the other person, especially of the family bonds and
even the community at large. He thus incurs guilt: the conflict between triumphal abuse of power
and a stance of ethical consideration eventuating in guilt. I could even, with Buber (1947, 1951,
1958; Friedman, 1983, 1999), talk here of the radical conflict between community and politics,
between personal bonds and the power plays of party and society. At the end, Creon still falls into
abysmal shame and humiliation, into an ultimate doom of disgrace and weakness. Both parts, the
affirmation of excessive pride and the violation of the ethical postulates, are phenomena of mas-
sively destructive aggression that is rooted in narcissistic vulnerability: being deeply wounded
and fearing renewed wounding in his self-value.
On the other side, we find in Antigone an extreme stand of defending the higher laws and
avoiding a higher order of guilt—but thus incurring shame and disgrace (and even lower level
guilt as well); it is an absolute defense of an object libidinal value, the defense of the bond and
loving attachment to the other person (and family and community); but in its very excess and
overvaluation again, paradoxically, assumes narcissistic qualities and ends in at least one form of
narcissistic defeat.
The position of absoluteness, of the global nature of all value pursuits is the core of hubris
and in my view might come closest to what Aristotle (1927) referred to as hamartía. Such abso-
luteness is utterly self-centered and destroys the very values it pretends to protect and represent.
In the words of E. Bobrick (2015; this issue): “The tragic hero is notably unconcerned with con-
sequences.” Specifically, “by making death serve their ends, they bring only more death.” The
tragic heroes quite generally seem “required to damage their community to be who they are”
(p. 46).
18 LÉON WURMSER

The conflicts are what one would call narcissistic: only the power of fanatical pursuit counts,
regardless of the needs of life, individuality, personhood, and community. Freud (1914) called
“overvaluation the stigma of narcissism.” This overvaluation and exaggeration belongs to the
very essence of tragic conflict, tragic vision, and tragic character (Dostoyevsky was to call it
“svoyevolye” or “self-willedness”). For me, the most poignant formulation of this attitude has
been made by the Latin satirist Juvenal: “Hoc volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas!” (“I want
this, I demand this; my will should replace rational argument” or more literally: “instead of a
reason, will shall be;” cited in Büchmann, 1946, p. 247).
The crucial two notions in regard to aim and object are breaching of limits and power—two
notions that bring us at least into the general area of the Greek concept of hubris. The chorus says
in Oidipous Tyrannos:
Insolence breeds the tyrant (hýbris phyteúei týrannon), insolence if it is glutted with a surfeit, unsea-
sonable, unprofitable, climbs to the roof-top and plunges sheer down to the ruin that must be (eis
anánkan), and there its feet are no service. But I pray that the God may never abolish the eager
ambition (pálaisma) that is noble for the polis
i.e., competition within the political community.
As Kaufmann (1969) rightly said: Hubris is not pride, it is an “anarchical defiance of the
bounds” (emphasis added; p. 76), a “wanton disregard for the rights of others;” it means inso-
lence, an arrogant breaking of the laws of nature or state (pp. 74–76). Such self-righteous breach
of norms is accompanied by self-justification.
4. Still, something crucial needs to be added: What is the origin of hubris? In today’s
understanding, this cluster of archaic (narcissistic), absolutistic, and overwhelming motivations
and conflicts stems most likely from massive trauma, a deep and ancient woundedness—be it
individually suffered, be it suffered by family, community, nation, and may often reach far back
into history. Severe traumatization as basic to human experience leads to the characteristic fea-
tures of totality, globality, radicalism, and the insistent all-or-nothing, especially reflected in the
archaic superego (Wurmser, 2000, 2007, 2012; Wurmser and Jarass, 2012).
One certainly would not have to go far to find this layer in the three Theban plays, most
dramatically in Oedipus’ origins. In his words to the old herdsman who had saved him: “Oh woe,
why do you address my ancient suffering (evil)? (oímoi, ti tout’ archaı̄on ennépeis kakón?).”
“What pain did I have—ti d’álgos íschount’” (vv. 1033, 1031), expelled to die, with pierced heel
tendons, with both parents’ explicit wish for him to die. In the second play he tells Theseus: “I
have suffered terrible wounds (evils) upon wounds (evils)—pépontha, Theseū, deiná pros kakoı̄s
kaká” (O.C., v. 595).
Indeed, Ismene, Antigone’s sister, refers to the acute recurrence of such a traumatic state.
Creon had commented on her recently manifested “lack of sense” (being ánous) whereupon
Ismene responds (in a passage I try to translate as closely as possible): “Not so, my lord; even a
mind that has developed does not remain so when you are doing terribly, but it disappears—oud’
hos an bláste ménei/ nous tois kakōs prássousin, all’ exístatai” (vv. 563/564). In other words:
under severe or extreme distress, one goes to pieces, one loses one’s mind. This is the traumatic
state that is so much feared and yet repeated by the protagonists.
That global wish for breaking the limits, a devouring ardor and insistence, is fraught by its
very intensity with destruction and disaster. The conflict can thus be put most succinctly as the
wish to violate the most basic limitations and boundaries in the desperate fight against a mortal
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 19

wound: the emptiness and sense of annihilation, the most radical feelings of loneliness, of terror,
primal shame, and pain. I suspect that it is this crisis of mortal wound and desperate search
(or desperate flight, in Oedipus’s case) that the ancient Greeks from Homer through Euripides
used to call Ate—the Goddess of blindness and disaster, as inward temptation or as a blinding
demoniac force from without.
The breaking of limits may be a creative discovery, the exhilarating sense of being one with
Nature, with the mystery of creation, the merging through the senses in the psychedelic expe-
rience. Or it is the breach of the limits of order, rationality, and measure; the regression to the
forbidden wishes of the Oedipal tragedy, to the breaking of “law and order” by Antigone, Orestes,
Prometheus. In most tragedies (and operas as well!), this layer of conflict clearly culminates in
various triangles of jealousy, prototypically, of course, the Oedipus conflict that Freud rightly put
in the center of dynamics: wanting to have total possession of the other to overcome the pain of
being the excluded third.
So far I have mainly focused on the central conflicts in tragedy and tragic experience. I now
single out a few particularly salient features.

Pathos

Pathos, the term used by Aristotle (1927) time and again, means both suffering and affect. Both
are applicable for tragic experience—be it in one’s own life, be it in one’s patients, be it in
social and historical contexts. Analysts find these overwhelming affects directly; they find them
as symbolic images (of doom, perdition, as apocalypse, as in the Hesiod, 1959, quote given
later or in countless examples in the Bible), and they find them enacted as concrete catastrophe.
The intensity of the suffering encountered already when we talked about the mortal wound is,
by rights, considered by many (e.g., Kaufmann, 1969, and Muschg, 1948) as the hallmark of
tragedy; it is also the stigma of these patients.
Again, in literature, as well as in clinical observation, the suffering is double: (a) To be over-
whelmed by affects like yearning and blind love, towering rage and abysmal shame, devastating
loneliness and inner deadness, horrifying guilt and terror, is painful suffering to the extreme and
is terror in its own right. We know the traumatic experience when the ego is overwhelmed by
an unmanageable affect. I think this is one source of suffering, the one we see clinically and
the one that is expressed etymologically in the words pathos, pathema, and the Latin passio.
Passion is, indeed, at least partly, suffering; extreme passion, even as culminating excitement and
enthusiasm, may tilt over into extreme pain, into traumatic grief and terror.
(b) But suffering is also the result of these passions, of these affects that break through all
order and measure. The murderous road rage of Oedipus and annihilating imperiousness of
Creon; the jealous wrath of Lear and Othello; the devouring greed and ambition of the Macbeths;
and the lechery of Troilus and Cressida, where “appetite, a universal wolf . . . must make per-
force a universal prey, and last eat up himself . . . ” (I.3, 121–124); the erotized shame rage of
Kleist’s Penthesilea; the ruthless creativity of Rubek in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken” and of
Masterbuilder Solness; the “murder of love for profit” in John Gabriel Borkman—all these rapa-
cious affects cause suffering and death. They dictate the lives against the ego’s better knowledge;
they overwhelm rational decision and attempts at moderation. It is precisely the rapaciousness,
the devouring global nature of these passions that cause suffering and disaster for these “tragic
characters.”
20 LÉON WURMSER

It might overstretch the analogy if I called all those who are overwhelmed by such vehement
affects, especially rage, love, terror, and greed, tragic characters. Yet,disaster is an inevitable
consequence of their unmanageable passion. An almost indispensable aspect of this suffering
is that it cannot remain internal: The propensity to provoke an external catastrophe is, I think,
part of the tragic experience, almost always present in literary tragedies (Aeschylus being an
exception), always a menace and often an actuality in the clinical experience: suicide, suicide of
the chosen partner, inevitable rejection and total isolation, social humiliation, endless torture in
an indissoluble marriage, inescapable guilt.
External catastrophe and death symbolically represent and confirm self-condemnation (of the
masochistic aspect in the tragic fate) inherent in the overwhelming guilt and shame that, in turn,
lead back to the overwhelming passions and limitless wishes, and, last, to the wound in the core.
Thus, externalization should be considered a conditio sine qua non for this complex of the
tragic experience.
I would not do justice to this aspect of suffering if I failed to go back to the root, to what I
called the wound in the core—this basic affective state of pain and yearning, underlying the tragic
conflict and all what follows. Should one not talk with these patients about primary pain and
primary shame—as one talks about primary anxiety? What the origin of this source of suffering
might be one cannot know at the outset: Which narcissistic injury, when, in whom, in what family
constellation—that emerges only under careful exploration.

Hybris (Hubris)

I mentioned previously that what we would now call hybris is an overweening, arrogant form of
narcissism: a willful, conscious, defiant breaking of limitations, a rape of the rights of others, an
insistence of standing above the law and on might makes right. Does one find this always—in
literature, in political and social life, and in clinical experience? I believe so, although in our
cases this hybris is very often masked. The crashing through of social norms and of the rights and
needs of others, whether it is the unwillingness to accept human frailty in others (and oneself) or
the callous sacrificing of a person for a supposedly higher value—one finds it wherever one looks
at tragedy: They sacrifice human reality to a Godlike ideality, though in themselves more than in
others. It is an uncompromising pursuit of a goal of totality and perfection that rides roughshod
over the boundaries sanctified by tradition and human need, over the limitations of the self. Good
is never good enough could be the motto for many, and the crushing rage and depression if the
goal of perfection recedes like a white mountain into the fog of disillusionment and despair.
One particular form of hybris is very frequent and prominent and has not been connected with
the age old notion of hybris: the emotional exploitation of others. It is, again, the consistency
and massivity of the exploitation of the other person for one’s sexual or ambitious needs, for
dependent clinging and especially for power that haunts the tragic character deeper and deeper
into the steppes and icy deserts of his loneliness. His relationships are tenuous, thin, brittle, like
ice bridges over the fissures in glaciers; they are evanescent despite their symbiotic tenacity,
poisoned by mutual, unfulfillable demands, destructive and based on lies and deceit as in A Long
Day’s Journey into the Night. Are these forms of human exploitation not modern equivalents of
hybris? I believe so, without disregarding the still actual importance of the original meaning: of
the powerful tyrant’s hybris who violates the rights of others and laws of custom in the higher
interest, e.g., the absolute right of the racial superman, the ideological dogma, national security,
or saving face.
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 21

And should we not think of a third form of hybris, more relevant perhaps even than the other
two (besides unlimited pursuit of perfection and exploitation), at least in the most “progressive”
society—the reduction of world and human fate into numbers and organization, the sacrifice
of the individual and of overarching values to quantity and calculation? What is most valuable
when it is a limited practice, becomes massively destructive when applied without philosophical
perspective.
I believe these forms of hybris are integral parts of tragedy. It is also significant that such
limitations are transgressed in outer reality in the service of a supposedly higher value—whether
it is Creon’s “law and order,” or Edmund’s “nature” (in King Lear) or Hedda Gabler’s autonomy
and self-assertion. These transgressions of limitations leading to guilt or shame are rationalized
and justified by such higher values; their real meaning, their tragic nexus, is veiled, is masked.
The brilliant light of the highest, greatest good, its life redeeming value, is the luminous defense
shining over the transgressions and invasions, blinding against the mortal wound, hiding the
shadow of the desperate yearning. It is this blinding light that makes the stumbling over the
crucial line into crime both possible and imperative.

The Heroic Aspects

All through the literature, the tragic has been connected with noble, heroic features and a splen-
dor of idealization. Aristotle (1927) used the word “spoudaîos,” translated as noble, but also as
industrious, zealous, and, perhaps, also as intense. Tragic lives are not marked by outward pas-
sivity. Their search is an active pursuit, not a passive submission. This does not mean that the
fear of massive surrender may not be a very important motive behind this often frantic quest. But
phenomenologically, these lives have a heroic aspect; they are not passive victims caught up in
the drift of inexorable events. They are defeated in their actions, that is true. Their actions lead
to catastrophe, but they act. Their passion is not passive (although the ego is, vis-à-vis id and
superego).
And there is something exemplary, a starkness, the clear light of radical conflict, about their
lives. The stronger the light, the deeper the shadow, including that of ignorance, of the uncon-
scious source of drivenness. But the sheer intensity of the conflict and the role of idealization
endows these personages, in clinic and literature, with a heroic shine: the depth of despair, the
fire of their rage, their paralyzing terror, the fury of their love. It is not the melodramatic flam-
boyance of the hysteric, but a seriousness and radicalism where death, indeed, seems to wait
around the corner and to step in—symbolically or concretely. His icy grip is mentioned time and
again.
The tragic fate is a heroic fight against catastrophe, death, and inner deadness, which fails.

The Tragic Experience as a Temporal Sequence

Not only on stage, but in outer reality as well, the tragic life is a sequence of conflict, of crisis
(krisis in Greek means decision), of deeper and deeper entanglement (the “tragic knot”) in arro-
gance and aggression, in guilt and shame, the breaking through of the overwhelming passions
(terror, rage, depression, love), and the catastrophe. The catastrophe does not have to be death—
suicide or accident—or homicide, as it very often is, but it may be the catastrophic destruction of
the creative and social potential (Wurmser and Jarass, 2012), or the emotional destruction of the
next of kin, a psychotic break, or the shipwreck in compulsive drug use.
22 LÉON WURMSER

Something analogous can be found on the stage of politics and in the destiny of entire nations
and cultures.
It may also not have to be a one-time sequence; in the tragic destiny (in contrast to the stage),
we, rather, see the repetition of this sequence: (a) tragic conflict (the mortal wound and the
desperate search); (b) crisis (especially narcissistic crisis); (c) passion, guilt, and shame (the over-
whelming pathos); and (d) catastrophe. It is a compelling force inexorably driving to the end, an
explicitness that sometimes endows this destiny with a nobility and heroism that evokes awe and
compassion. The feeling is that of King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, They
kill us for their sport” [Act IV, Sc. II, 38]. Only the Gods are within, and the tragic hero tries so
very hard to conjure them up on the outside and tame them there.
In deeper analysis, much of what I have examined up to now (the higher value, the exter-
nalization of guilt and shame, perhaps some of the passions and compulsive pursuits) function
defensively against deeper layers—last against the mortal wound, the core of injury of narcissism
and trust, in other words, some primal form of shame. Spread over the entire problem of under-
lying tragic experience are the cover symptoms, the screen attitudes and character traits, the
pseudo-solutions with which these patients enter analysis or therapy, or with which the heroes
start out on stage—the antitragic defenses. They are all masks, forms of self-deception. It would
lead too far to deal with them now.
To illustrate, clinically, some of these aspects, I turn now to a case one might consider a tragic
character.

The Story of a Murderer

I saw this man, at the time in his early 30s, many years ago, for 4 years in psychotherapy; at the
beginning the treatment was sporadic, later it gained momentum and intensity (I described his
history and the dynamics in far more detail in Wurmser, 1978). A tall, hunched over man with
flickering eyes, Andreas entered our methadone program when the doctor who, for a few years,
had prescribed liberal doses of narcotics to him was closed down by the authorities. He wanted
to see me because he suffered from severe anxiety attacks and insomnia.
Gradually, and piecemeal, he relayed his life history to me:
I am the younger of two; my sister is 10 years older than I am. I doubt if my father was ever different
than unhappy, discontent, and chronically ill and crippled. However, a nagging wife and a job he
completely loathed kept him from dwelling on his other misfortunes. Although my parents never
physically hit each other, they either argued violently, or they sulked in silence. . . . When I was 4 or
5, my next-door neighbor and playmate was killed before my eyes as a truck ran over him while we
were playing in front of my house. I had no real conception of death; I ran down the street thrilled
that something important and exciting had happened. I may have felt badly about the incident later,
but at this point in time, I do not recall.

An early play experience stands out in my mind as being rather odd, if not bizarre. While playing
with toy soldiers I would fantasize that I had been captured by the enemies and was tortured until
I would give up the secrets. The fantasizing pleasure was from two sources: the physical pain itself
and the concept of bravery resulting from withstanding the pain in a manly fashion. I would also
pretend that the lady across the street was my mother. I visualized her as a cruel, sadistic woman who
would administer spankings.
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 23

When I was six, I stole a bottle from a Coca-Cola truck, was caught, and undoubtedly punished. I can
still recall the fear and shame associated with the scene.
At the age of 8, Andreas was forced by a young man to perform fellatio on him, a traumatic
event he mentioned only much later.
At 15, he was close to a roaming gang of rather wild friends. Once it happened that, when they
were attacked with snowballs, one of them, the Whelp, got out and stabbed two of the attackers
to death. Andreas was not with them, but came upon the scene shortly thereafter. The Whelp was
sent to jail for 4 years.
At 16 and 17, Andreas earned some money by serving as a homosexual “hitchhiker,” being
sucked by men of respectable standing like policemen and physicians. He suddenly dropped out
of school, engaged in several homosexual adventures, and got in with the same group of friends,
including eventually, again, the Whelp. By then, the patient was 19. One evening, three of them
had group sex with a girl in a club room. She taunted them that one of them had not been a “good
lover.” The Whelp felt ridiculed, played the threatened and humiliated one, tried to pick a fight
with our patient, and finally spat in his face, because Andreas would not give him a ride home.
He wanted to think that I was afraid of him, that he should get the respect he felt he deserved after
he had already killed two people. That I did not fight back right then and there, when he spat on me,
was because I felt stunned by shame, like paralyzed: That was the only motive to what followed.
About a week later, when they ran into each other again, the Whelp told Andreas: “You are
okay; I am sorry; I did not mean what I said.” Strangely enough, this semiapology was the crisis
point that led up to the conviction in Andreas: “Now he has shown himself to me to be weak—
now you can get back at him! His brief sign of weakness was so repulsive.” Thus, repulsion and
scorn were added, in Andreas, to the long-accumulated shame and rage. One week later, his foe
challenged Andreas again into fighting him and taunted him as a coward. The patient refused, but
went home, got a gun and eight bullets, drove around throughout the night, afraid of coming upon
his enemy and scared of his own anger, even consciously avoiding places where he might run into
the Whelp. Finally, in early dawn, he came, as he wants at least to see it, almost by chance, upon
his antagonist, when the latter, after yet another brawl, tumbled out of a bar room. I give Andreas
the word to tell the event as he recounted it only 4 years into psychotherapy:
The Whelp and his adversary were just coming out, ready to fight. I was not upset, not trembling;
I had convinced myself that I had allowed myself to be as insane as I could be. I shot him twice
through the chest. It came as a surprise to me. It was unbelievable. In any such emotional situation,
the time element changes, seems to pass at a different rate. It was like a slow-motion movie, frame
after frame, but 10 seconds appeared like a lifetime. My first feeling was humor, surprise; it sounds
terrible. I thought he was just play-acting. He began to stagger, appeared to make it seem worse than
it was, overly dramatic. And every moment was strobe-like. I still see every scene separately, and the
time was very stretched out. At first it was humorous. Then he was falling towards me. I had the fear
that he was falling on me, and I wanted to fight him off and tried to shoot again, but I did not have
any more bullets. I was puzzled: I had had 8 bullets and had shot only 2. So I went to the car looking
for the additional bullets but could not find them. Then I went straight home for more bullets. I did
not assume that he was dead. It was a complete feeling of unreality when I was driving home—no
sorrow, not one emotion, nothing. I ran to the kitchen, took a big butcher knife and stuck it in the belt.
I was definitely going now for all-out war—that “it” was about to happen, not that “it” had already
happened. The thing that changed it completely and got me suddenly stuck in the tracks was: My
mother had left food out for me with a note. It made me sick! I suddenly realized—it put it back in
24 LÉON WURMSER

proportions: “Someone loves me, shows me human kindness! What the fuck have I done!” That was
reality for me: leaving the food out, and I realized what I had done. I went back with the car and
looked at what had happened. There was a lot of police there. I rode by. No one noticed me. I did
not know where to go. I had no desire to run away. Then I told myself: “You have not done anything
wrong—but something justifiable.” . . . I went to the police station after driving around several hours
and told them I had shot that guy. At first they did not want to believe me. They had already arrested
someone for it! It was the guy with whom the Whelp had been fighting and who had run away after
I had shot the Whelp. If I had not given myself up, he and the police would have been in trouble.
When I came in that room where that guy was sitting—I never saw anybody so relieved. He shouted:
“That’s him; that’s him!” It was like a movie. He might have been convicted for it.
Acquitted because of temporary insanity a year later, although adjudged sane in an institution
for the criminally insane, Andreas was, paradoxically, set free after 1 year in jail and went back
to college. But soon his moods of emptiness, boredom, dullness, loneliness, and sadness took
over again. He also felt very much an outsider, out of place, ill at ease with the normal students.
During that dark time he got married.
In that period, there were two adventuresome things that made life interesting and worthwhile
again: a homosexual liaison and the turning to narcotics. These two, by their very wrongness,
broke through the empty, sad mood. For the next 8 years, he was on illegal heroin and Dilaudid,
then on methadone, working only irregularly as an unskilled laborer.
Some months after entering therapy and a brief period of work in the dry docks, his murderous
and tragic fate nearly repeated itself a second time: During an episode of unemployment late one
night, he gave a co-worker of his, Sleazy, and some others a ride home from a tavern. The other
reviled the old homosexual friend of Andreas. Andreas finally burst out in verbal anger and
was, in turn, slapped in the face by Sleazy. Again, the jump from humiliation to blind rage was
instantaneous. He got out of the car and knocked his foe out with such force that he broke his
own hand.
His disastrous aggression was experienced by him as an outside force, mobilized by humili-
ation or loneliness, split off, unrecognized in its emotional content (denied and repressed), and
yet breaking through with unmanageable, meaningless force and violence. Suicide and homicide
were bloody reality for him.
When I think about myself, my life, everything seems meaningless. . . . It is now as if a part of me is
working against me, stops me from thinking. I have been working against myself, over and over. It is
like the part in me who wants to see me fail in everything, to be a miserable failure, even in talking.
. . . This self-destructive thing always had sexual overtones. It’s difficult to explain. Now it is largely
suppressed by the methadone. I only feel these two somehow go together: to be self-destructive and
this sexual feeling. Although, now, I am like a prisoner in the program, I do not fear this destruction
so much; it is controlled by the drug.
The sexual nature of moral masochism can hardly be described more clearly.
We came close to the unknown inner demon who always wrecks:
I remember my earliest dream, a very frightening dream; perhaps I was five. A monster was looking
in through the second-story window where I slept. I saw his very long legs from the ground. Then I
was looking down from a bridge and saw a very large, big, teddy-bear-like animal running, or a lamb;
it was monstrous. I only remember the terror and the feeling of death.
I remind him of the child that was crushed to death. He immediately responds:
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 25

But there was nothing emotional. I was too young to understand it. I was not upset, only excited.
I could not wait to tell my friends when they came from school what an exciting thing I had
experienced. It was a Coca-Cola bottle truck on a construction site.

This was in contrast now to the first version, where it was in front of his house. I asked him
directly whether he might not have repressed another part—the intense anxiety and ensuing
rage—which later on emerged in the claustrophobia (being pinned to the ground) the importance
of which he kept emphasizing. Sometime later, he resumed:
I spoke with my mother about that memory. She told me that I was so upset at the time when I came
home that I was unable to talk. It is odd how differently I remembered it. And it also occurred to me
that I stole the Coke bottle from the same type of truck at the same place and in such a way that I was
caught at once. I expected to be punished, but the response was not as severe as I expected. There
must be a connection to all that. I remember the boy who died was a very good kid. We played a lot
together. He shared his toys, but I did not want to share my things with him. I have never thought
about that before, but he was my best friend and best enemy; I competed so much with him and was
jealous. I wonder whether I felt responsible for his death? We were not allowed to go on the street,
but I went with him anyway. I turned around and saw the truck behind me. If I could have given him
a warning? I wonder what really happened.

I add that I believe that the crux lay in his guilt feelings: that his murderous wishes could,
indeed, become true—towards that boy and perhaps also towards his parents, and that we can
understand now the anxiety in his early dream too. The monster staring in was his bad conscience
for his murderous wish: “He sees it and is going to get you.”
That dream was so real. And then this weird shaped animal, like a giraffe, running below, a funny
animal, that was movement, but in the monster part there was no action, only staring; it was static,
and the fear he would do something, I don’t know what. His face was as big as the window. The
animal below was polka dotted, or a strange color, perhaps purple.

I asked, “Was that not perhaps the purple, distorted form of the crushed boy, but running again?
And then came the monster, the guilt; in the dream you were partly undoing the terror by making
the animal, the boy funny and running again.”
I tied it in with his lifelong need to repeat both the aggression and the self-punishment, because
he never got the punishment he expected from the monster: not for the boy’s death, not for his
stealing the bottle, not for his outbursts with his parents nor for his murder, and that he was
still haunted by the fear that the monster was catching up with him. He was stunned by the
connections, then added: “After the homicide, I wanted to go to jail and expected 7 to 10 years,
and did not get it. Instead, the following 10 years were as if I had been in jail, wasted, on drugs.
. . . I wonder whether I pushed the boy or argued with him. Perhaps it is not real, but I feel
the guilt.”

His self appears in a curious double form—conjoined in the masochism. He feels sexually excited
about hearing children being beaten up with belts by a woman (Freud’s, 1919, classical “beating
fantasy”), which leads to a microanalysis of a very important part of acting out:
26 LÉON WURMSER

It is the same sexual feeling with homosexual wishes—that I am punished, that it is wrong, that I am
completely controlled by someone else, that he has total power over me. It is like looking in a mirror:
that I am ultimately in control. I only play-act, as if I were controlled and exploited, and have him
push my head down to his penis. If I really lost control, it would turn into something unpleasant.
I want to be masochistic, but I want to dominate the situation. If I lose control, if a girl or a man
really takes the whip out, I get furious. It is paradoxical: I enjoy a homosexual act where I pretend
that the person has me under control and forces me to fellatio, that I am subjugated by someone
stronger than me, but as soon as they really believe it, it turns my mood off.
It is, indeed, a precarious balance between two nearly equally strong parts, which are not really
in conflict with each other, but coexist in a curious split with most abrupt flip-flops: the illusion
of total power/the illusion of masochistic subjugation. Socially, it is no different: “Subjugated,
but really subjugating, dominated, but really dominating.”
The present homosexual acts appear like attempts to master the trauma of the forced fellatio:
that they contain both the defenses of turning passive into active and of archaic repression/denial
with resulting splitting or doubling. The mixed wish-fear scenes of parental intercourse and fights,
of the crushed boy, and of forced fellatio are turned from situations of extreme passivity, help-
lessness and powerlessness into situations of a merely feigned subjugation, but real, complete
control and power. All these acts and experiences combine sexual excitement and fascination
with a curiously split image of brute force and violence, of tormentor and victim, a scenario
masochistically replayed and reenacted, but secretly controlled and mastered by him, followed
by a sense of guilt, repentance and shame, while he is feeling relaxed and freed of his boisterous
anger and combativeness, and able to work.
The shame part, I suspect, is the reaction to the replay of the early scene in its masochis-
tic version, the identification with the mastered and castrated mother, whereas guilt, relaxation,
and freedom of anger are the response to his own sense of force and power, the identification
with the controlling, castrating father. The split thus reflects the repressed double identification
with the sadistic father and the masochistic mother in the primal scene, and their many fighting
scenes, which had become strongly sexualized for him. His lifelong, most destructive sense of
self-punishment in the many forms of humiliation and self-murderousness repeat these three orig-
inal traumata in split, double form: To be more exact, his sadistic-narcissistic façade gives him a
feeling of power and specialness, of entitlement, accompanied by guilt. It hides the all-pervasive
sense of weakness, dependency, and enslavement, that fills him with intolerable shame. Thus, his
life is like a constant dangerous journey between the Scylla of shameful defeat and humiliation,
leading to blind rage and murder, and the Charybdis of guilty success, triumph and self-sabotage.

The treatment came to an abrupt, unexpected end: After the interruption for my summer vacation,
Andreas did not return to therapy, but continued on methadone maintenance. When I, by chance,
encountered him, he was furious at me for having “forced” him into detoxification for what he
saw as my own vanity (his methadone dose had, at his request, been lowered).
The real reason came out only gradually: When I was writing this report for publication, I
asked him for his permission. He gave it to me readily and in writing. Yet when an excerpt,
in disguised form, appeared in a professional journal, one of the colleagues in the program
made him aware of it. The patient was outraged about it, specifically about the references to
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 27

his homosexuality. He warned some of the therapists in the program that he planned to kill me,
and it was only due to the intervention of several responsible counselors that this danger could
be averted. Later, he succeeded, on low doses of methadone and in continued psychotherapy
with a female psychiatrist, to conclude his studies and to assume a high position in the city
administration.
It was later that I, thanks to the work of Paul Gray, had come to pay special attention to
the transference of defense, and particularly to the transference of superego aspects. Today I
consider it probable that one motive for the breakup of treatment and for the death threat was
expression of such superego transference: The scornful and tormenting conscience, that inner
judge that condemned him to death, his partly unconscious anal-sadistic superego, were reexpe-
rienced and dreaded in me. He sought a counter-figure in me that would undo that threat. Support
and approval by me, even the inspiration from me, was an important part of improvement and
progress. However, when he thought he found proof for his worst fears, everything turned topsy-
turvy; his life-determining reversal from passive to active again came into play, once more as
murderous revenge for a suspected insult and humiliation. The rabid cruelty that his conscience
was directing against him threw itself upon the representative of this conscience in the outside
world and had to tear him apart. Many years later, he confessed to his therapist that he still wanted
to kill me.

The recognition of the consistent defense of masochism by sadism, specifically in regard to

superego aspects, and reenacted in the transference has become, for me, one of the most important
technical tools in the treatment of the severe neuroses, and beyond this to one of the most valuable
insights into the genesis of aggression altogether. The masochism, in turn, would then be in this
case, like in the others, understandable on the basis of the premisse of power through suffering.
The masses of narcissistic fantasies serve, in the first place in traumatic situations, as protection
against helplessness, and, in the second place, as protection against the onslaught of condem-
nations by the superego. Narcissism would not be treated as a primary drive manifestation, but
as a fantasy structure with major defensive meaning. The same holds true for masochism: The
masochistic core fantasies relive traumatic experiences in staged scenarios of managed suffering
and shame, with the primacy not of the mechanisms of perverse sexuality, but of fantasy equa-
tions of sexualization of violence, centrally repeated in the submission to the tormenting, rigidly
judgmental, anal-sadistic superego.
Finally, an important point of technique: I have found it useful in all cases and in all forms of
masochism to join the uncovering of the psychodynamic connections, in psychoanalytic work
proper, with tactfully used references to the world of creativity, to literary prototypes, i.e.,
with some psychotherapeutic interventions. In a different context, I spoke about this enlarge-
ment of the therapeutic technique in severely ill patients and mentioned that everything that
helps the working through of the conflicts with affect and insight is of value. Perhaps this is
the one effective counterforce against the dehumanization endured by these patients: the recov-
ering of their own creative powers—and this not in loneliness, but in the curious dialogue of
psychoanalysis.
28 LÉON WURMSER

“PRIMARY SHAME” AND “MORTAL WOUND”

Shame and Shamelessness

The prophet Isaiah describes the sense of shame and the defense against it: “I did not hide my face
from insult and spittle. But the Lord God will help me—therefore I feel no disgrace; therefore
I have set my face like flint, and I know I shall not be shamed” (50. 6/7 Isaiah, p. 964, JPS
Hebrew-English Tanakh).1
Under the title “The Politics of Dignity,” Thomas Friedman wrote in 2012 in the New York
Times:
Humiliation is the single most underestimated force in politics. People will absorb hardship, hunger,
and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars, and benefits. But if you force people to live indefinitely
inside a rigged game that is flaunted in their face or make them feel like cattle that can be passed by
one leader to his son or one politician to the other, eventually they’ll explode. These are the emotions
that sparked the uprisings in Cairo and Moscow.
They were not driven by ideology, but “rather by the most human of emotions—the quest for
dignity and justice” (New York Times, Feb. 1, 2012, p. A25). In another column, he quoted the
historian Leon Aron: “’Dignity before bread’ was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution. ‘The
spark that lights the fuse is always the quest for dignity’” (l.c., June 5, 2011, WK 8, “Advice for
China”). But dignity, respect, self-worth, and pride are those experiences or feeling states whose
violation is felt as shame.
And to its counterpoint, an editorial in The New York Times stated: “No Shame: Republicans
who slashed State Department budgets now complain about security failings.” I quote the core
paragraph:
It doesn’t take a partisan to draw that conclusion. The ugly truth is that the same people who are accus-
ing the administration of not providing sufficient security for the American consulate in Benghazi
have voted to cut the State Department budget, which includes financing for diplomatic security. The
most self-righteous critics don’t seem to get the hypocrisy, or maybe they do and figure that if they
hurl enough doubts and complaints at the administration, they will deflect attention from their own
poor judgments on the State Department’s needs. [p. A22, NYT, 10/15/2012]
This immediately brought to my mind the graphic and beautiful description by Hesiod, the
great early Greek poet (who lived sometime between 750 and 650 BCE) of the apocalyptic “iron
age” (in the translation by Richmond Lattimore):
Right will be in the arm. Shame will not be (aidós ouk éstai). The vile man will crowd his better out,
and attack him with twisted accusations and swear an oath to his story.. The spirit of Envy (zelos),
with grim face and screaming voice, who delights in evil, will be the constant companion of wretched
humanity, and at last, Nemesis and Aidos, Decency and Respect, shrouding their bright forms in pale
mantles, shall go from the wide-wayed earth back on their way to Olympos, forsaking the whole race
of mortal men, and all that will be left by them to mankind will be wretched pain. And there shall be
no defense against evil. [Hesiod, 1959, vv. 192–201]

1 “Panay lo histarti, miklimmot waroq. Wadonay Hashem ya’azar-li. Al-ken lo nichlamti; al-ken samti panay

kachalamish; wa’eda ki-lo evosh.”

 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 29

Such a devastating state of anaídeia, marked by violence, abuse of power, injustice, and lying,
has haunted mankind’s history throughout and is lamented by writers of all ages and tongues.
It is accompanied by deep suffering of many, and insolence, hubris (hybris), of the few. This is
what tragedy and tragic experience are all about.
Shame and humiliation, in their many shades of meanings, and shamelessness as a reaction
formation against shame, are central to disorders of the self: disturbances of self-esteem, of self-
respect, of self-cohesion and the sense of integrity, in brief, of narcissism in the widest sense.
All these terms describe a set of problems analysts encounter not only in very many of our
patients, but they know them well out of their own inner history, and follow their march through
thousands of years in literature, philosophy, and religion all over the world. It is intrinsic to the
tragic experience and to the tragic sense of life.
As I have shown in the case presented, shame is embedded in a web of traumata, in pro-
found superego conflicts, and in vicious cycles of narcissism, masochism, and self-destruction.
This tightly woven net is the psychoanalytic frame for an understanding of tragedy and tragic
character.
I continue with a study of shame itself and its dynamics.

Aristotle’s Analysis of Shame

In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle2 devoted a fascinating phenomenological analysis to .“shame”
(Rhetoric, II.VI, 1383 b ff.). Konstan (2006) observes, “Aristotle’s subtle analysis of shame . . .
offers new perspectives on several problems and paradoxes that arise within modern treatments
of shame and related sentiments” (p. 93). Aristotle mostly uses the verb for being ashamed (in
German “sich schämen”) aischýnesthai and, somewhat less, the noun aischýne. He starts off with
the question: “What are the things of which people are ashamed (poîa d’ aischýnontai) or are
shameless about (anaischyntoúsin), and before whom (pros tínas), and in what state of mind (pos
échontes)?” In this question, three distinct elements immediately stand out: People are ashamed
about or of certain things (poîa?), they are ashamed in front of certain people (pros tínas?), and
there is a certain state of mind implied (pos échein?). I called the first question the one about the
subject pole and the second the object pole. The third refers to affect, emotion, or attitude. He
immediately starts answering this third question:
Let shame then be defined as a kind of painful affect (lýpe) or upset (taraché) in respect of bad things
(kakôn), which seem to bring disgrace (or humiliation or dishonor: adoxía), bad things that may be
present or past or future; and shamelessness as contempt and indifference in regard to these same
things.

This fundamental distinction fits, I believe, reasonably well with the one we make when we
differentiate between “the depressive affect of shame” (about the degradation of the self having
already happened and/or being now ongoing) and “shame anxiety,” about the danger of such

2 I am very grateful to David Konstan for having made me aware of this fundamental work in his very helpful book

The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006). I transliterate the Greek ypsilon as y, not as it is often done in English, as
u. I use the Loeb edition and translation by J. H Freese, but modify it strongly to be closer to what seems relevant to the
present-day psychological way of thinking.
30 LÉON WURMSER

dishonor and disgrace to occur or to be imminent. We also know that the current state of being
humiliated is strongly joined to the fear, that such humiliation will recur or continue or get even
worse. I am reminded of what Rangell (1968) wrote, that anxiety is a reaction “always to a
danger, which is always a traumatic situation, which is always present, and always anticipated”
(p. 387). All this, mutatis mutandis, applies to the twin affect of anxiety and depression about
exposure and contempt, i.e., shame anxiety and the depressive affect of shame (cf. Wurmser,
1981).
But in this amazingly modern study, Aristotle (1926) goes one step farther: “If this definition
of shame is correct, it follows that we are ashamed of all such bad things as seem to be disgraceful
(aischrá), either for ourselves or for those whom we care about.” This means that the shame we
feel about, the “subject pole [of shame,]” is not restricted to “bad things” in us, but in those
whom we feel identified with: as he said later on, very much also our family, our ancestors,
our city, and our people or clan. “People feel shame for those whom they are closely connected
with (angchisteía).” (We witnessed this just very recently when a prominent Chechen living in
America expressed her deep shame about the bombing of the Boston Marathon by two Chechen
expatriates.)
Aristotle goes on detailing a series of examples for what one is ashamed of or should be
ashamed of: cowardly deeds; character defects and attitudes like small-mindedness (mikropsy-
chía), pettiness, and stinginess; lack of education befitting to one’s status; weakness and failure;
sexual licentiousness and illicit relations; taking advantage of those who are weak or dependent;
flattery and exaggerated show of feelings; and boasting and avoiding necessary effort.
Turning to his second question—in front of whom?, i.e. the object pole—he first calls
shame a fantasy (a perception, an image, an idea) of humiliation (perí adoxías phantasía)”, humil-
iation for its own sake and not for its consequences, and then adds crucially that people feel shame
before those whom they esteem, those who are important for them. More specifically: “those who
admire (thaumazónton) them and those whom they admire„ those by whom they wish to be admired,
those with whom they compete and whose opinion they do not put down.

Even this is not all: Aristotle also stresses the role of the eyes, the importance of being seen
(or, more generally, of being perceived), as a proverb says: “The eyes are the abode of shame—to
en ophthalmoîs eînai aidô” (actually close to a quote from a now lost play of Euripides).
And here he does not use, as up to that point, the word aischýne for what I called the painful
affect of shame and shame anxiety, but rather aidôs, the protective attitude of shame, the char-
acter trait of avoiding self-exposure or disgraceful acts or behaviors, also reverence (in German
Scheu), even awe (Ehrfurcht). Psychoanalytically speaking, this attitude of aidôs is a reaction
formation against wishes for self-exposure (exhibitionism, what I called delophilia) and curios-
ity (voyeurism, theatophilia). Similarly, Konstan (2006) distinguishes: “Indeed, the two concepts
would seem to be psychologically discrete, ‘shame’ being an emotion while a ‘sense of shame’
is more like an ethical trait” (p. 95). Although the Greek terms are not always clearly distin-
guished, Douglas Cairns (1993, p. 2) offers this definition: “Let aidôs be an inhibitory emotion
based on sensitivity to and protectiveness of one’s self-image.” Konstan (2006) cites the lex-
icon’s translation of the term aidôs as “reverence, awe, respect, sense of honor” (p. 94). It is
always “prospective and inhibitory” (Cairns, 1993, p. 13; Konstan, 2006, p. 94). I believe all
this matches quite well what I describe as the third meaning of shame, as in: “Sir, have you no
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 31

shame?” or Hesiod’s (1959, vv. 192–193) “Shame will not exist—aidôs ouk éstai”–– i.e. shame
as reaction formation, as protective attitude, in contradistinction to shame as depressive affect
and shame anxiety.
Here it might appear as if Aristotle takes shame, especially aischýne, to refer only to being
seen by others. However, we also know from antiquity that there is a different, namely internal,
dimension to shame, as there is, in turn, an external one to guilt (in contrast to a frequently made
glib distinction of guilt being internal and shame external). In his monumental work, Paideia,
Werner Jäger (1933) notes that Plato, in the Republic, uses the parable of Gyges and his ring
that makes the one wearing it invisible for his fellow men: “That ring could distinguish the man
who acts justly because his soul is just, and the man who only puts up an outward show of
justice, whose sole motive is respect for social appearances” (p. 330). The same issue is raised
by “Democritus, when he attributed a new importance to the old Greek concept of aidos, secret
shame, and replaced the aidos which men feel for the law . . . with the wonderful idea of aidos
which a man feels for himself” (Jäger, 1933, p. 330). Later he adds about Socrates’ “turning
away from the outer to the inner world” and crucially states: “It was Democritus’ substitution
for the old social meaning of aidôs (shame before one’s fellow-men) of a new sense, the shame
which a man can feel for himself (aideîsthai heautón). This creation of a new concept was highly
important in the development of the ethical consciousness” (Jäger, 1943, p. 378 f.). One certainly
can speak of one’s inner eye before which one feels shame. Konstan (2006) appears to agree
with this view, even in regard to Aristotle, when he states “that true shame arises only if one
knows oneself to be at fault. Shame is aroused, as Aristotle observes, by an action of the kind that
exposes a defect in the agent, but the agent is not wholly at the mercy of public opinion” (p. 105).
Konstan summarizes (2006, p. 101):

Shame, for Aristotle (and I would say for Greeks in the classical period generally), results from
imagining particular acts or events, whether committed or intended, for example doing someone an
injustice or failing to help another when it is in one’s power to do so. It is possible to make amends
for such offences, whether by apologizing or by some other form of compensation. They are limited
acts, and do not necessarily entail an annihilation of one’s sense of self. At this level, Aristotle’s
discussion encompasses the modern idea of guilt. Shame-inducing behavior, however, in addition to
being unjust or inappropriate, also testifies to a character flaw or moral failure, and in this respect it
is damaging, like modern shame, to one’s self-esteem or at least to one’s self-representation in the
world.

Especially when he adds that “the idea of a divided self was perfectly familiar to Aristotle and
his contemporaries” (p. 303), one is already in the area of the psychoanalysis of shame. I was
surprised to what extent Aristotle’s analysis converges with the one I had given in my book.

A Psychoanalytic View of Shame

In the following, I presuppose much of what I have written in the Mask of Shame (Wurmser,
1981).
I just spoke of three main forms of shame: the two negative forms of shame as anxiety and
as depressive affect, and the third positive form, shame as a protective attitude, as a guardian of
values and ideals. We have to specify further these three groups of phenomena covered by the
32 LÉON WURMSER

concept of shame, and then, second, what goes beyond their descriptive or phenomenological
meaning.
Shame is, first, the fear of disgrace. It is the anxiety one has in fearing to be looked at with
contempt for having dishonored oneself —a danger looming: “I am afraid that exposure is immi-
nent and hence terrible humiliation.” Second, it is the feeling one has when one is looked at
with scorn —the feared event having happened. In its second form, it is the affect of contempt
directed against the self—by others or by one’s own conscience. Contempt says: “You should
disappear for being the person you have shown yourself to be—failing, weak, flawed, and dirty,
out of control over your emotional, physical or social self.” One feels ashamed for being exposed,
shown up as one who has failed the expectations of others or those of one’s own conscience. One
stands very much under the glare of one’s own mind’s eye or the eyes of the others. To dis-
appear into nothing is the condign punishment for such failure, not to be seen anymore. Third,
shame is almost the antithesis of the second concept, as in: “Don’t you know any shame?” It is
an overall character trait preventing disgraceful exposure, a shield of humanity and civility, not
unlike the Yiddish (and German) Menschlichkeit, being a Mensch, the central precept of Judaism
of derech eretz (Wurmser, 2012). It is an attitude of respect toward others and toward oneself,
a stance of reverence, discretion, tact (the German words Scheu and Ehrfurcht). It also entails
sexual modesty. It also may be an attitude: “I should hide and dissemble, in order not to expose
myself, not to show myself.” This third form of shame as attitude, as reaction formation, can be
viewed as a much more general protection mechanism against broad-based wishes for expres-
sion and perception, thus guarding the privacy and intimacy of the self. Therefore, being treated
with contempt for one’s identity, for one’s needs, will, and judgment, is profoundly shaming.
As Brouček (1991) described, all forms of objectification, of dehumanization, of being treated
as if one were a thing engenders profound, even traumatic shame: “soul-blindness” and “soul
murder” (Shengold, 1989).
In all three forms, one can discern an object pole, in front of whom one feels ashamed, and
the subject pole, for what one feels ashamed.
Yet, as analysts we need to go beyond what we observe, beyond a phenomenological depiction.
What is the explanation for the chronic state of all-pervasive shame that preoccupies us clinically,
the one shown in the case already presented and the case Sonya presented in the parallel study
(Wurmser, in press)? What are the layers of work we pass through in our long-term analytic work
with such very difficult patients? What is explanatory and causally resolvable?
Above all, it would be wrong to assume that such generalized shame would simply be caused
by chronic shaming, by frequent or incessant humiliation. Certainly this factor is frequently
present, and it is causally very relevant, as chronic traumatization. The response, in treatment,
to it—in form of an empathic, respectful stance—is very helpful, in the sense of a corrective
emotional experience. This generically interactive aspect, based on the recognition of chronic
traumatization, is a conditio sine qua non for any effective therapy. Still, the situation is far more
complex. The trauma forms part of a whole concert of dynamic factors, as will be shown in the
following section.
My main intention in writing The Mask of Shame (Wurmser, 1978) was the consistent appli-
cation of the psychoanalytic focus on inner conflict to this affect and attitude: to study shame as
the result of inner conflicts, and, in turn, to explore the conflicts resulting from those three main
forms of shame.
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 33

This does not mean that all that shame entails can be reduced to conflict psychology and thus,
ultimately, to some kind of structural model. Trauma and endowment, developmental deficit,
and conflict are clearly complementary concepts, requiring constant, dialectical attention. This
becomes clearer when one looks at the structure of psychoanalytically relevant causality:
The more severe the traumata, the more overwhelming the affects. The more radical and
overwhelming the affects, the more intense the conflicts. The more intense and extreme the
conflicts, the more encompassing (global) the defenses and the more totalitarian the contradic-
tory demands of the inner judge, that sadistic version of the superego, the archaic superego
(Wurmser, 2000, 2007, 2011a, 2011b). Thus, the trauma lives on in the severity and pitiless char-
acter of the conscience, as well as in the split character of the superego, i.e., various parts of
conscience: commitments, obligations, ideals, values, and loyalties clash with each other. They
become irreconcilable, just as it is characteristic for every tragedy.
The more extreme the aggression of the superego, the more life-determining are the fantasies
and the more prominent the core phenomena of the neurotic process (compulsiveness, globality
and polarization), meaning: the broader the problems of narcissism, of splitting of identity, and
of compulsiveness.
But there is more to it, something I have regularly found of enormous dynamic importance:
the omnipotence of responsibility as defense against utter helplessness.
Narcissistic fantasies, in general, serve in traumatic situations as protection against helpless-
ness. Very often we encounter this particularly important version of protective omnipotence, the
fantasy, almost delusion of the absolute, total nature of responsibility, as if to say: “If I only would
be strong and good enough, all these awful things would not happen. Whatever abuse occurs, it
is all my fault.” At the price of enormous guilt or shame, the patient protects himself (or herself)
against the even more frightening helplessness.
Thus, throughout the material in these patients goes the absoluteness both of their con-
science and of their ideal: they themselves must be perfect and behave accordingly; their
self-condemnation is correspondingly totalitarian, the need for self-punishment implacable,
catastrophic, the Gods merciless—the pathos in tragedy, translated as calamity.
In the words of a very accomplished physician: “Either I am constantly showered with praise
and affection or I feel I am a total failure.” The fantasy of perfection and omnipotence can never
be fulfilled. What remains conscious is abysmal shame and guilt. The dynamics of this omnipo-
tence of responsibility, as a protection against traumatic helplessness, and hence the totalitarian
sadism of the inner judge, need to be put into words, many times, to bring about a gradual relief,
comparable to Aristotle’s kátharsis.
Or, as Sonya, an addict, said: “I’m aware of the part that has to be perfect —in contrast to
the person who suffers, as a result of the abuse from men, humiliated over and over again” (cf.
Wurmser, 1996, in press).

“When I Think of How I Make Myself Invisible”—Thoughts About Traumatic Shame

I strongly suspect that Aristotle’s (1926) term for shame—taraché, which literally means con-
fusion, upset, something like going to pieces—may refer to a traumatic state of shame anxiety,
a sense of fragmentation, and “wanting to disappear as the person one is,” “wanting to sink into
the earth.” I try to give now a clinical background to what we saw in classical tragedy as mortal
wound, the profound trauma lurking behind pathos and hubris.
34 LÉON WURMSER

Kilborne (2002) describes how “too much unbearable shame leads to a loss of the self, and
a loss of self generates more shame. And unconscious shame leads to greater dependency upon
both what others see of us and what we imagine they see” (p. 92). Again Aristotle’s (1926)
“shame resides in the eyes,” a “painful feeling and distress about disgrace” in the eyes of people
we admire (II,VI 18, p. 1384a).
We find the feeling of shame in its multilayeredness and depth as prominent among the fright-
ening affects induced by trauma. In many cases, much of psychoanalytic work may consist in
listening to the sense of current slights that seem to confirm the feeling of one’s own unworth.
In fact, the analysis, itself, can be—and often is, indeed—traumatizing as a repetition of this orig-
inal link between trauma and shame within the transference or, rather, within the real relationship
with the therapist. What is this link, however?
1. One root may, indeed, be massive shaming, real humiliation, as part of the trauma, and
that seems to be a self-evident connection. But there is far more that we uncover in our
analytic work.
2. Very commonly it is the shame about the intensity of feelings in general, the great anxiety
to express them and the anxiety of inner and outer loss of control. Often it is the premise
in the family, supported by cultural prejudice, that it is a sign of disgraceful weakness
and thus of vulnerability, to show, or even just to have, strong feelings. This causes a
very strong tendency to be deeply ashamed. The body, especially sexuality, may be even
far less strongly shame inducing than this alleged weakness of having strong feelings:
feelings of neediness, of longing, of tenderness, of being moved, of being hurt. Many
look then for a partner who is an antishame-hero: someone emotionally untouchable,
impenetrable, invulnerable, a disdainful ruler. Looking for the acceptance by such a figure
and merger with him or her would remove the shame of feeling and wishing too strongly,
but it means an almost incorrigible masochistic bondage, and a renewed and deepened
sense of disgrace.
3. Closely related is the shame about a defining aspect of trauma: affect regression. The
affects battling each other overwhelm the capacity of the ego to master them, a failure
that leads to the split between the groups of ideas, to the act of making the connections
unconscious, about which Freud originally was speaking (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895).
Dissociation and even hypnoid states remain important concepts for the understanding of
the traumatic genesis of the severe neuroses. Severe, repeated traumatization means that
every emotional experience resonates as if it were the recurrence of the trauma. It leads to
the standstill, usually partial, of affective development: the differentiation, verbalization,
and desomatization of the emotions are blocked. Thus, in traumatization, by definition,
the feelings, once roused, very rapidly become overwhelming; get out of control; and are
global (dedifferentiated), beyond symbolization (deverbalized), and being experienced
as if they were physical (resomatized). These three concepts of dedifferentiation, dever-
balization, or hyposymbolization, and of resomatization, represent, according to Krystal
(1988, 1998), affect regression. But there is something else of great importance, especially
in the recurrent traumatization in childhood: These affects tend to appear in sexualized
form. Sexualization is an archaic defense set up to regulate affect. The affect flooding,
combined with this very primordial defense by sexualization, leads, however, to an over-
whelming sense of humiliation and embarrassment: Not to have any control over one’s
own emotional life is just as shaming as the loss of sphincter control, if not more so.
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 35

Aggressive wishes are then being used to reestablish control, a form of further archaic
defense to deal preventively with a spiraling out of control, an important way of turning
passive into active.
4. Then, shame is caused by the experience that one has not been perceived as a person with
the right for one’s own feelings and will. The soul blindness of the other evokes the feeling
of great worthlessness; the contempt of the other expressed by disregard for one’s own
inner life is matched by self-contempt. I mentioned how analysis, itself, may be shaming
and thus, inadvertently, repeat the traumatogenic shame. There are many ways of doing
this: Sometimes it may be the silence to a question, sometimes a sarcastic comment, often
direct drive interpretations, and, what I see particularly in my supervisions in Europe, the
unempathic, forced relating of every aspect to transference. All this can be felt to be soul
blind and with that giving the sense of unworth, Aristotle’s adoxía. Incomprehension
and tactlessness are experienced as a renewed deep insult and shaming, “being trampled
upon.” Or it might be a derisive laughter and tone of voice: “Don’t you see that you
treat me as if I were your mother?” The patient comments: “I felt as if I were treated
like an imbecile. It was profound shame and very confusing.” Again, I am reminded
of Aristotle’s taraché, being in inner disorder, in an uproar, confused—a repetition of the
traumatic state. It is both a transference of a disordered early relationship and transference
of trauma; but it is also a retraumatization in reality, not just transference.
5. As we saw, it is typical in severe traumatization in childhood that sexualization is
deployed as an attempt to regulate affects (Fraiberg, 1982). Both the flooding with affects
and the very archaic defense by sexualization lead to an overwhelming feeling of shame.
On an additional frontline of defense, aggressive wishes, impulses, and fantasies are
thrown in as means to reestablish control; they should stop the further tumble down in
that regressive spiral.This archaic equation of traumatic affect storms, sexualization, and
aggression leads, on the one hand, to global forms of defense, above all of denial, external-
ization, and projection, and, as a result, to the observable dissociative phenomena and, on
the other hand, to massive countermeasures by the superego in form of the same absolute-
ness and pervasiveness of shame and guilt. Much of this hypertrophy of judgmentalness
(the archaic superego) consists in the dominating fantasy of omnipotent responsibility set
up as protection against traumatic helplessness.
6. Every kind of excitement turns, as affect regression, into overexcitement and overstimula-
tion, and this has to lead inevitably to a crashing down, to a very painful disappointment.
This traumatic, passively experienced process is again and again turned around into some-
thing actively reenacted. How so? It happens so that every joy, every gratification, every
expectation, everything good has to be broken off and changed into something negative
and bad. It may seem as if it were unconscious guilt that would make it appear as if one
did not deserve to be successful. This may certainly contribute. But that dangerous, morti-
fying, shame-laden excitement appears to be more important: “It is too dangerous to sense
pleasure and joy; it will be abruptly taken away or it will become unbearably intense and
totally unfulfillable.” Thus, the inner judge, the archaic superego, has to prevent all plea-
sure. This is one cardinal root of the negative therapeutic reaction (Wurmser and Jarass,
2012).
7. Closely connected with this is a seventh reason: that of the intrapsychic passivity. David
Rapaport (1953) wrote about the passivity of the ego. Often, what appears like ordained
36 LÉON WURMSER

from the outside is, in truth, an inner passivity in regard to affects and drives, but also,
and no less so, a passivity vis-à-vis the threatening and hammering superego. There is not
only profound anxiety about being helplessly delivered to these inner powers, but also
shame for such inner ego-passivity. Outer victimhood is very often its externalization: a
repetition on the outside in the vain attempt to resolve it within.

The Trauma of Objectification and Being Not a Means, But One’s Own Purpose
(Selbstzweck )

Soul blindness (the obtuseness toward the emotional interests and needs of the other and the self),
and soul murder (treating the other as a thing, exclusively as a tool for one’s own gratification
that simply can be discarded when not needed anymore) are found whenever man is not treated as
aim and purpose in itself, but solely as a means to an end. Who is used as a mere means, man as
an instrument, as a dehumanized being, stripped of his or her individuality, senses the humiliation
expressed in the depersonalization and reacts with a sense of unworth, of shame, and eventually
with helpless fury. Eventually, he directs the full force of this resentment against the other.
Or it is turned against the self—in form of a sequence of severe traumatization with lack of
empathy, leading to shame and self-hate, with a sadistic superego part claiming omnipotence.
That entails the great practical importance of the connection of trauma and aggression. Lawrence
Inderbitzin and Steven Levy (1998) criticized, in their important article “Repetition compulsion
revisited: Implications for technique,” the literature on psychic trauma for their onesidedness,
especially for their disregard of the severity of conflicts about aggression:
In our view, what is regularly absent from such formulations is a consideration of the intense frustra-
tion and ensuing aggression such trauma generates and the opportunities for aggression provided by
`re-experiencing trauma’. The trauma appears to take on an instinct-like role that really belongs to
the aggression created by the trauma. [p. 41]
Therefore, the manifest disturbances are then ascribed to defect and damage,—again a
shaming label—instead of conflict and compromise.
It is the conflict about aggression, as it shows itself moment by moment in the analytic work,
that needs to be addressed again and again: the fear of envy, jealousy, vengefulness, rage, and
hate—much more than the inferred aggressive affect or drive itself. Yet I always stress that
aggression has to be seen and interpreted always as secondary to a hurt of the self, or fear of
such damage, especially in form of humiliation and rejected love (Mitchell, 1993).
I would like to end with a Midrash (n.d.):
There is a story that Rabbi Yannai when once walking in the road saw a man of exceeding effusive-
ness (or distinction, meshuppa, ‘overflowing’) who said to him: “Would you, Rabbi, care to accept my
hospitality?” Rabbi Yannai answered: “Yes,” whereupon he brought him to his house and entertained
him with food and drink. Yet R. Yannai tested him in the Bible, and found nothing, in the narra-
tive parts, and found nothing, in Mishnah, and found nothing, and in the Talmud, and found nothing.
Then he told him: “Take up the wine cup and bless the meal!” The host replied: “Let Yannai recite the
blessing [in his house!?]:” Said the Rabbi to him: “Are you able to repeat what I say to you?” “Yes,”
answered the man. Said Rabbi Yannai: “Say: ‘A dog has eaten from Yannai’s bread.’” The man rose
and held him with the words: “You have my inheritance which you are withholding from me!” Said
Rabbi Yannai to him: “And what is this inheritance of yours that I have?” The man answered: “Once
I passed a school and I heard the voice of the children saying: The Law which Moses commanded
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 37

us is the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob (Deut. 33.4). It is not written: the inheritance of
the congregation of Yannai, but the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob.” Rabbi Yannai asked:
“How have you merited to eat at the table with me?” The man answered: “Never in my life have I,
after hearing slanderous talk, lashon hara, repeated it to the person spoken of, nor have I ever seen
two persons quarrelling without making peace between them.” Said R. Yannai: “That I should have
called you a dog when you show such morality, derech eretz!” He applied to him the passage: “ . . .
and to him who improves his way I will show great prosperity–– wesám dérech ar’énnu bejésha elo-
hím.” For Rabbi Yishmael ben Nachman said: “Derech eretz, Menschlichkeit, preceded the Torah by
26 generations—essrim weshesh dorot qadmah derech eretz et-hattorah.” [commentary to Leviticus
9.3 in Wayiqra Rabbah]

That means that, according to Jewish tradition, the profound relatedness to the other person,
the Mitmenschlichkeit, and particularly, the respect for the other and the avoidance of shaming
goes back to the very origins of being human.
We saw: At the core of tragedy and tragic experience lies the urge to violate the most basic lim-
itations and boundaries. This drive in turn is rooted in what we know as being deeply wounded:
severe and chronic traumatization, and the desperate search for some healing. This image of the
“mortal wound at the core of being” stands for what we now would call primary pain, primary
shame and primary anxiety as the essence of the tragic dimension of human existence.
The counterpoise to this trauma and mortal woundedness is being seen by the other; it gives
to life protection and meaning. It holds us back from those abysses of primal shame and tragic
circularity.
I conclude with two quotes from Martin Buber that express what complements that tragic
dimension of existence: “Human beings give each other the heavenly bread of being oneself”
[“. . . einander reichen die Menschen das Himmelsbrot des Selbstseins”] (Buber, 1951/1965,
p. 37). “The real master responds to uniqueness” (Friedman, 1993, p. 366) [“Der wirkliche
Meister weiss dem Einzigartigen zu begegnen”] (p. 449).

REFERENCES

Aristotle. (1926), Art of Rhetoric (Loeb Classical Library), trans. J. H. Freese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1975.
—————. (1927), The Poetics (Loeb Classical Library), trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe. London: Harvard University Press,
1965.
Assmann, J. (2003), Die mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus. Munich, Germany: Carl Hanser.
—————. (2006), Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt. Vienna, Austria: Picus.
Bible. (1999), Isaiah. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society.
Bobrick, E. (2015), Sophocles’ Antigone and the self-isolation of the tragic hero. Psychoanal. Inq., 35: 40–46.
Breuer, J., & S. Freud. (1893–1895), Studies on hysteria. Standard Edition, 2. London: Hogarth Press.
Brouček, F. J. (1991), Shame and the Self . New York: Guilford.
Buber, M. (1947), Dialogisches Leben. Zurich, Switzerland: Gregor Müller Verlag.
—————. (1951), Urdistanz und Beziehung. Heidelberg, Germany: Lambrecht Schneider, 1965.
—————. (1958), Schuld und Schuldgefühle. Heidelberg, Germany: Lambrecht Schneider.
Büchmann, G. (1946), Geflügelte Worte und Zitatenschatz. Zürich, Switzerland: Classen
Cairns, D. L. (1993), Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honor and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford, UK:
Clarendon Press.
Editorial: No Shame: Republicans who slashed State Department budgets now complain about security failings. (2012),
New York Times, October 15, p. A22.
38 LÉON WURMSER

Fraiberg, S. (1982), Pathological defenses in infancy. Psycho-Anal. Quart., 51: 612–635.

Freud, S. (1914), On narcissism: An introduction. Standard Edition, 14: 69–102. London, Hogarth Press.
—————. (1916), Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work. Standard Edition, 14: 309–333. London:
Hogarth.
—————. (1918), From the history of an infantile neurosis. Standard Edition, 17: 3–122. London: Hogarth.
—————. (1919), A child is being beaten. Standard Edition, 17: 175–204. London: Hogarth.
—————. (1923), The ego and the id. Standard Edition, 19: 3–66. London: Hogarth.
—————. (1924), The economic problem of masochism. Standard Edition, 19: 157–170. London: Hogarth.
—————. (1937), Analysis terminable and interminable. Standard Edition, 23: 209–253. London: Hogarth.
Friedman, M. (1983), Martin Buber’s Life and Work (Vol 1). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University.
—————. (1988a), Martin Buber’s Life and Work (Vol. II). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University.
—————. (1988b), Martin Buber’s Life and Work (Vol III). New York: Dutton.
—————. (1999), Begegnung auf dem schmalen Grat. Martin Buber—ein Leben [Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A
Life of Martin Buber]. New York: Paragon House, 1993.
Friedman, T. (2012), The politics of dignity. New York Times, February 1, p. A25.
Grene, D., & R. Lattimore, eds. (1956), Translation of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides: The Complete Greek
Tragedies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hesiod. (1959), Erga kai Hemerai [Works and Days], trans. Richard D. Lattimore. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan.
Inderbitzin, L. B., & S. T. Levy. (1998), Repetition compulsion revisited: Implications for technique. Psychoanal. Quart.,
67: 32–53.
Jaeger, W. (1923), Aristotle. Fundamentals of the History of His Development. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
—————. (1933), Paideia. The Ideals of Greek Culture (Vol 1). Blackwell: Oxford, 1965.
—————. (1943a), Paideia. The Ideals of Greek Culture (Vol 2). London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
—————. (1943b), Paideia. The Ideals of Greek Culture (Vol 3). London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Kaufmann, W. (1969), Tragedy and Philosophy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Kilborne, B. (2002), Disappearing Persons: Shame and Appearance. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Kohut, H. (1971), The Analysis of the Self . New York: International University Press.
Konstan, D. (2006), The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Krystal, H. (1988), Integration & Self-Healing. Affect, Trauma, Alexithymia. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
—————. (1998), Desomatization and the consequences of infantile trauma. Psychoanal. Inq., 17(2): 126–150.
Midrash Rabbah. (n.d.), Commentary to Leviticus 9.3 in Wayiqra Rabbah, trans. H. Freedman & M. Simon. London:
Soncino Press, 1983.
Mitchell, S. (1993), Aggression and the endangered self. Psychoanal. Quart., 62: 351–382.
Muschg, W. (1948), Tragische Literaturgeschichte. Bern, Switzerland: Francke, 1969.
Rangell, L. (1968), A further attempt to resolve the problem of anxiety. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 18: 371–404.
Rapaport, D. (1953), Some metapsychologial considerations concerning activity and passivity. In: Collected Papers of
D. Rapaport, ed. M. M. Gill. New York: Basic Books, 1967, pp. 530–568.
Scheler, M. (1914), Zum Phänomen des Tragischen. In: Vom Umsturz der Werte. Ges.Werke, 3. Bern, Switzerland:
Francke, 1955, pp. 149–169.
Schiller, F. (1791), Sämtliche Werke. Leipzig, Germany: Hgb P. Merker, Reclam.
—————. (1792), Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen (Vol. 3). Leipzig, Germany: Hgb P.
Merker, Reclam.
Shengold, L. (1989), Soul Murder. The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Sophocles. (1967), Sophoclis Fabulae (Oxford Classical Texts). Clarendon.
Steiner, G. (1961), The Death of Tragedy. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
Wurmser, L. (1978), The Hidden Dimension. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
—————. (1981), The Mask of Shame. Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1995.
—————. (1993), Das Rätsel des Masochismus. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
—————. (1996), Trauma, inner conflict, and the vicious cycles of repetition. Scandinavian Psychoanal. Rev., 19:
17–45.
—————. (2000), The Power of the Inner Judge. New York: Jason Aronson.
 REFLECTIONS ON TRAGIC EXPERIENCE AND CONFLICTS 39

—————. (2007), “Torment me, but don’t abandon me.” Psychoanalysis of the Severe Neuroses in a New Key.
New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
—————. (2011a), “Buber und die Psychoanalyse—die heutige Psychoanalyse und Buber.“ Lecture, Buberhaus
Heppenheim, Sept. 1, 2011. In: Dein Licht in meiner Hand. Magdeburg, Germany: Klotz Verlag.
—————. (2011b), Scham und der böse Blick. Verstehen der negativen therapeutischen Reaktion. Stuttgart, Germany:
Kohlhammer.
—————. (2012), Archaic Heritage, the Self-Contradiction in Monotheism, and the Jewish Ethos of Menschlichkeit:
Thoughts of a Psychoanalyst about a Triple Centenary. American Imago, 69: 401–429.
—————. (in press), “Primary shame,” “mortal wound” and tragic circularity: Some new reflections on shame and
shame conflicts. Internat. J Psychoanal.
—————, & H. Jarass. (2007), “ Jealousy and envy—New views about two powerful feelings.” Psychoanal. Inq.
—————, & H. Jarass. (2012), “Nothing Good is Allowed to Stand”—An Integrative View of the Negative Therapeutic
Reaction [Monograph: Psychoanal. Inq. Book Series]. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

904 Crestwick Road

Towson, MD 21286
leonwurmser@verizon.net
Copyright of Psychoanalytic Inquiry is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright
holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.