ABSTRACT
Studying shame, I noted shame's special importance in narcissis-tic disorders. Others exploring shame support this conclusion (see Morrison, 1997). Approaching the study of disgust, I had little preconception regarding what types of people might be especially prone to disgust, except perhaps to wonder about disgust's relationship to the various eating disorders and to obsessive-compulsive fastidiousness. Having attended to disgust reactions for some time now, I still see nothing that equates with the "shame personality" (Mayman, 1974), for whom the avoidance of painful shame states is a central dynamic. Although Freud, Anna Freud, and many other psychoanalytic writers regularly juxtapose shame and disgust in discussions of superego reaction-formations, more recent consideration of shame has highlighted its painfulness more than its protectiveness. The absence of a disgust syndrome likely speaks to disgust's less painful and more successfully self-protective character when compared with shame, which at times operates defensively but is fundamentally the emotion of the vulnerable self in painful self-awareness.
