Book description
Shame, the quintessential human emotion, received little attention
during the years in which the central forces believed to be motivating
us were identified as primitive instincts like sex and aggression. Now,
redressing the balance, there is an explosion of interest in the
self-conscious emotion. Much of our psychic lives involve the
negotiation of shame, asserts Michael Lewis, internationally known
developmental and clinical psychologist. Shame is normal, not
pathological, though opposite reactions to shame underlie many conflicts
among individuals and groups, and some styles of handling shame are
clearly maladaptive. Illustrating his argument with examples from
everyday life, Lewis draws on his own pathbreaking studies and the
theory and research of many others to construct the first comprehensive
and empirically based account of emotional development focused on shame.
In this paperback edition, Michael Lewis adds a compelling new chapter
on stigma in which he details the process in which stigmatization
produces shame. Paul Ekman, Ph. D. Author of
Telling Lies
and Why Kids Lie
Lewis brilliantly illuminates the nature of shame and its impact in our
daily life, uniquely combining scholarly research, stories from everyday
life, and clinical cases from his own practice. Lucid and insightful, it
is must reading for scholars and laymen, researchers in emotion and
development, and clinical practitioners. Michael Lewis
is the author of Panic!, Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball,
The Blind Side,
and Home Game
, among other works. He lives in Berkeley, California.
