Thank God I’m not like them: On Shaming People’s Defenses as a Defense

Public shaming is as old as humanity itself. At any given time certain behavior is deemed disgusting and worthy of ridicule. Woman have been publicly shamed for having children out of wedlock, men have been ostracized for being gay, and certain sexual practices have been mocked. Shaming that is invariably carried out by those who self-identify as defenders of morality, truth, love and the good.

One contemporary version of this involves ridiculing people due to their perceived psychological defenses. As an example of this I recently came across a religious apologist attacking people who might be called narcissists.

Narcissism seems particularly easy to hate because it appears to describe an individual who thinks they are better than everyone else. An individual seduced by their own image. But just as it’s obvious that someone being gay or straight doesn’t in any way make them moral or immoral, so having narcissistic defenses has no moral dimension. It is simply an unconscious response that an individual employs at certain times in their life. If morality enters in to the discussion, it comes in to play regarding the position we take toward our defenses.

Apart from anything else, shaming someone for being a narcissist means falling for the lie of narcissism. It’s a complicated issue, but often the truth of narcissism is found in the opposite of what it presents us with. It is often a guise that covers over a deep self-shame and self-hatred. What appears as self-love reflects a tragic sense of self-loathing. This is why people who suffer from narcissism often seek help (because they perceive that it is a thin veil that covers over a deep pain).

We all have defenses. Some of us tend to engage in splitting (placing all inner aggression onto another so as to retain our sense of moral purity), others employ denial (repetitively disavowing ones own struggle), while many engage in regression (retreating into childhood interests) or displacement (directing anger at a person who acts as an unconscious stand-in for the real source of our anger).

There are many defenses and getting to know which ones we enlist under stress can be beneficial. In addition to this, the more we confront our defenses the more grace we’ll have towards others.

A good question for us to ask concerns what position we take toward our defenses… Are we aware of them? Do we try to work out what causes them? Do we find ways of giving them positive outlets?

For depending upon how we relate to our defenses they can become a source of great joy and creativity. Someone prone to paranoia, for example, might make a great fiction writer.

Shaming people for their defenses (which is often an expression of the defence that is splitting) can be very damaging as it either encourages the very defense it attacks, or can throw the person into depression by ripping away their defense when what is needed is a therapeutic environment where they can work through what sustains it.

In addition to this, it’s actually really hard to perceive a person’s psychological defenses. Just because someone might appear to us as narcissistic or paranoid, this might not be a pervasive struggle in their life. It’s tempting to reduce people to some kind of easily discernable symptom. So tempting in fact that psychoanalysts are trained not to do it. The idea that complex subjects with rich histories can be reduced to some simple diagnosis is not only reductionist, but detrimental to the therapeutic work. Therapists generally only engage in such activity as a necessary evil (for example, for the sake of insurance companies).

While psychoanalysis has a substantive and evolving theoretical framework designed to guide the therapeutic work, this framework was made for individuals, not individuals for the framework. In simple terms, this means that although the framework can help guide the work of analysis, what happens within the clinic is allowed to feed back upon the framework itself.

In short, categorizing people via their symptoms is a reductionist and violent act that allows for dehumanization and lack of empathy. It allows us to distance ourselves from others, and to temporarily avoid those parts of ourselves that we fear. All of us have defenses, and the game of “thank god I’m not like them” is evidence of one of them.

Some recommended reading,

Why Do I Do That by Joseph Burgo

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson