Shame Affect & Compass of Shame - Donald L. Nathanson

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• published: 18 Jan 2008
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http://www.heartspeakproductions.ca Tributary Streams of a Healing River is an in depth study of restorative justice with over 14 hrs of video on 10 DVDs. (available from Heartspeak Productions -- www.heartspeakproductions.ca) In this excerpt of Tributary Streams Donald L. Nathanson introduces Shame Affect and the Compass of Shame. Speakers Bio: Donald L. Nathanson, M.D. is a Philadelphia-based psychiatrist with a lifetime interest in the nature of human emotion. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that considered grand opera a good model for the normal range of emotion, he attended Amherst College, where he studied experimental embryology (publishing his first paper in this field while an undergraduate) and the electron microscopy of the viruses that infected Salmonella bacteria, graduating with honors in 1956. A winner of the New York State Professional Scholarship competition, he attended the Medical School of the State University of New York at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. While in medical school he did research at the Medical Electronics Laboratory of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, working with Vladimir Zworykin, developer of television and inventor of the electron microscope, and in London, working with Professor Dame Sheila Sherlock on the hepatic metabolism of synthetic steroids and Professor Paul Wood in clinical cardiology. A Residency in Internal Medicine at Hahnemann University Hospital with specialty training in Endocrinology drew him to Philadelphia after graduation from medical school, and he has remained in that city since. During his 1964-66 tour of duty as Staff Endocrinologist at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, he began to investigate the emotionality of the patients referred to him for endocrinologic evaluation and to act as medical consultant to that hospital's Department of Psychiatry. This fascination with the world of emotion forced him to cancel plans for an academic and clinical career in Endocrinology and take a Residency in Psychiatry at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital and Hahnemann---two programs steeped in classical psychoanalytic teaching. He was then, and remains now, astonished to find that most theories for emotion are based on an artificial split between biology and psychology. On completion of this program in 1969, he established a private practice in adult psychiatry, concentrating on the psychotherapy and training of psychotherapists. In 1981, he began to study the way each of us is influenced by the emotions of others, work that drew him to the pioneering writing of psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Although this phenomonology is usually discussed as part of the lore and literature of empathy, and taken as the province of the most mature and sensitive among us, Dr. Nathanson demonstrated that the broadcast, reception, and interpersonal interplay of affect are normal concomitants of the physiological affect mechanisms described by Tomkins. Only as children develop an "empathic wall" that allows them to remain variably immune to the affects of the others in their milieu can people learn both to maintain their personal boundaries when among others and to open themselves to the experience of another's feelings. It was during this phase of his enquiry that he began to study the biology and psychology of the shame family of emotions, work for which he is perhaps best known. Among his more than 100 publications in the realm of emotion are the books The Many Faces of Shame (New York: Guilford; 1987) and Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self (New York: Norton; 1992, paperback 1994). He has given several hundred public presentations of this material throughout North America and Europe, teaching a new way of understanding the biology and psychology of normal emotion as well as the connections inherent among normal emotion, psychopathology, psychopharmacology, and the full range of known psychotherapeutic techniques.