Introduction: from guilt to shame -- Survivor Guilt -- The slap -- She demanded to be killed herself and bitten to death -- Identification with the aggressor -- Survivor guilt -- The dead -- Dismantling Survivor Guilt -- "Radical nakedness" -- The survivor as witness -- Dramaturgies of the self -- The subject of imitation -- Psychoanalytic revisions -- Image and Trama -- Imagery and PTSD -- Miscellaneous symptoms -- Stress films -- PTSD and shame -- Shame Now -- Shame's revival -- Shame and specularity -- Shame and the self -- Autotelism -- The evidence -- Objectless emotions -- The primacy of personal differences -- Posthistoricism -- The Shame of Auschwitz -- The gray zone -- "That match is never over" -- The matter of testimony -- Shame -- The flush -- Conclusion -- Appendix.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the "survivor syndrome." Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame.