Shame
by Hélène Beinoglou-Négri
Athens, Greece
 I am a citizen of Athens and Europe. These past two years have been very intense with Greece being the center of attention around the world. As a therapist I am hearing the uncertainty and hopelessness of my patients. Around me friends, acquaintances or even strangers all express their fear of the present and the future.
I believe, though, that one feeling that is equally or more painful than fear is shame . Shame makes you feel totally exposed and unprotected. It brings back all the child’s memory of powerlessness. One of my patients, a forty year old woman once told me “I am so ashamed of being Greek that it makes me want to die, to disappear."
Bearing the burden of belonging to a community that is isolated and judged is a very common phenomena but remains deeply unsettling. As therapists it seems that we have to reflect on its impact on the psychic well-being of the people around us.
A few days ago I attended a European Conference where I saw the tensions, conflicts and fear that are experienced by our patients reemerge within the therapeutic community – making relationships often confrontational and surely very tense between the participants coming from different countries. It seems to me that it is not only our patients who are unable to contain their anxiety but, that the mental health community is often overwhelmed by its own annihilating anxiety as well.
The Conference was about Conflicts and Reconciliation. It was a heated one. I participated to in a group discussion after the morning presentations. A very confrontational debate started. Each participant challenging the values of the community to which the others belonged. Some very offensive comments where expressed. Someone said, for example, that the country of another psychoanalyst was very poor in terms of original psychoanalytical literature, stealing ideas from other psychoanalytical psychoanalytic communities. The participants seemed in the trenches throwing projectiles at one another. We were enacting the conflicts we were talking about in the room. The session ended without any acknowledgement of the violence that was released in the room. Any attempts that day to address these emotions were rebuked.
The debate was deeply embedded in crude, unmetabolized emotions. In this particular instance, instead of seeing the other as a unique individual, he or she became the representative of a negatively perceived group. Shame on us if we cannot do better than that.
Beinoglou-Négri Hélène
hbeinoglou@hotmail.com
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