Happiness and Success

If you are a highly motivated person, probably you will have to accept that your happiness level is below average. To advance human welfare, however, we need a motivational system that is NOT happiness-oriented:

The purpose of the human motivational system, according to psychologists, is not to make people feel happy, but rather to motivate actions that promote successful life outcomes. To be effective, this system should be flexible and adaptive, which it is. For example, people who become disabled typically experience deep depression after their accidents, but often adapt surprisingly quickly, soon reporting a mix of moods similar to what they had experienced before. Lottery winners invariably experience joy on receiving their windfalls, but often describe such feelings as fleeting.

To be happy is to take what you end up with, and to be successful is to get what you desire. When you accept and appreciate what you have, you experience what psychologists call synthetic happiness; When you achieve your goals or get what you really want, you have genuine happiness. The untold truth is that there is really not much difference between these two kinds of happiness: you are about equally well off with either one. But that runs in direct conflict with our motivational system: if we were to believe they are the same, nobody would take the extra effort to excel. As the result our culture makes us believe that genuine happiness is superior to synthetic one so that our society will advance. Or we might be able to explain it from an evolutionary perspective: the more motivated(less happy) tribes just won out in the process of natural selection.

If we do a global survey on happiness, I would not be surprised if most Latin American nations end up above countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Here is the original article from NYT, the main point there is to defend the pro-growth economic policy.

How do people spend extra money?

Here are the facts of the day:

Real per capita GDP in the United States is now three times higher than it was in 1958. What have people been spending all that extra money on? Is it all dictated by advertisers and salesmen who are inventing needs?

According to my calculations comparing 1958 and 2005 data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Americans spent 27 percent of the huge increase in income between 1958 and 2005 on medical care, 23 percent on their homes, 12 percent on transportation, 10 percent on recreation, and 9 percent on personal business activities.

The kinds of things that advertisers and salesmen typically promote were relatively unimportant. Food got only 8 percent of the extra money, clothing only 3 percent, and personal care 1 percent.

Unfortunately, idealistic activities also received little of the extra money: 3 percent for welfare and religious activities, and a similar share for education. Thus most of the extra money was spent on health, a nice home, travel and relaxation, and doing a little business.

This might provide some clues on the consumption trends of China in the next a few decades.

Polygamy

This is essentially a libertarian vs. egalitarian issue.

Becker's argument for polygamy:

...[Y]et isn't it offensively patronizing to women to believe they cannot make their own decisions about whether to enter into marriages that contain other wives? We do not offer men any special protections against the "wiles" of women, so why do women need such protection? Indeed, I believe that in marital decisions women are more thoughtful and far-sighted than men, partly because marriage has meant much more to women than to men.

The claim that polygyny is unfair to women is strange since polygyny increases the demand for women as spouses in the same way that polyandry would increase the demand for men. If men were to take multiple wives, that increases the overall competition for women compared to a situation where each man can have at most one wife.

Even though women as a group would gain from allowing polygyny, and men as a group would be hurt, not all members of each group would be affected in the same way. Men who do not have much to offer women would be more likely than under monogamy to remain unmarried, at least until they become older and wealthier, or more matured. Similarly, educated and otherwise attractive women who have a lot to offer might suffer if they have to face competition from several women who individually have less to offer, but collectively can offer as much or more...

And here is Posner's counter arguement:

My view is that polygamy would impose substantial social costs in a modern Western-type society that probably would not be offset by the benefits to the parties to polygamous marriages. Especially given the large disparities in wealth in the United States, legalizing polygamy would enable wealthy men to have multiple wives, even harems, which would reduce the supply of women to men of lower incomes and thus aggravate inequality. The resulting shortage of women would lead to queuing, and thus to a high age of marriage for men, which in turn would increase the demand for prostitution. Moreover, intense competition for women would lower the age of marriage for women, which would be likely to result in less investment by them in education (because household production is a substitute for market production) and therefore reduce women's market output.

Because polygamy is illegal everywhere in the United States, few Americans think of it as an option. If it were made accepectable by being legalized, who knows? There are 400 American billionaires, and several million Americans with a net worth of at least $6 million. Nor, with most women working, is it obvious that a man would have to be wealthy in order to attract multiple wives, though presumably men who wanted to be polygamists would have to be able to offer some financial inducements, since most women would prefer to be a man's only wife. As more and more men attempted to become polygamists, the "price" they would have to pay for a wife would rise, so polygamy would be a distinctly minority institution. But it would not necessarily be trivial in size or harmless in its social consequences, which would be likely to exceed those of homosexual marriage...

I think Posner opposes polygamy not only from a fairness point of view, but also from that of overall social welfare, which makes more sense to me by the way. Here are the original blogs from Beck and Posner.

The wisdom of the crowd or of the few

In essence what drives the much-hyped Web 2.0 is so-called "The wisdom of the crowd":

For the past decade, much of the Internet has been animated by the "wisdom of crowds," the notion that the tremendous masses drawn to the Web can together provide collective knowledge that outperforms even that of experts. By marshaling the knowledge and tastes of millions of people, the Web has fundamentally changed the way people can gain knowledge about their world.

This group wisdom, for instance, underpins the link-analysis formula Google Inc uses to rank search results. It influences the book recommendations offered by Amazon.com. It is also reflected in the votes of thousands of users who select the videos featured on YouTube, the articles showcased on the news aggregating site Digg.com and the ratings awarded movies on IMDB.com.

But some people don't agree with that:

But this wisdom of the crowd could be outsmarted by what Michael Arrington, editor of the TechCrunch blog, recently dubbed the "wisdom of the few." Sites like PicksPal rely on input from the masses chiefly as a venue for auditioning prospective experts, on the theory that these virtuosos could provide even more accurate information and predictions than the crowd.

"If you figure out which ones did the best and get rid of the ones who have no idea, you'd do even better. Distill it down to the people who really know," Arrington said.

So probably the best approach will be to find out the few wise ones by the wisdom of the crowd, and this is exactly what pickpals.com is doing.

While generations have looked to pundits for guidance, it has often taken a long time for their expertise to be recognized, and many have remained in obscurity. Now the Internet promises new ways to discover those who might otherwise get overlooked. And it can do so with breathtaking speed. Some business professors remain skeptical, warning that luck can often be mistaken for expertise. But as more Web sites try to find ways to tap the expertise of smart people, a great debate is shaping up between two competing models for harnessing the human mind.

To me this sounds like a very innovative way of talent scouting. Here is the link for the whole story.

How to be happy?

Happiness is such a subjective measurement of our well-being that everyone has his/her own way of trying to be happy(or unhappy for that matter). Some people are naturally sunnier than others no matter what life throws at them. Are they genetically blessed? Were they born with a silver spoon in their mouth? Or do they work harder to earn it? This blog tries to shed some light in answering these questions:

In 2005, a team of U.S. researchers developed a comprehensive model of sustainable happiness change that integrated the major lines of the subjective well-being literature. The result was a theory which proposed that up to 50 percent of one’s happiness was rooted in a genetically determined set-point, 10 percent was related to circumstantial factors (nation of residence, demographics, culture, income, etc), and the remaining 40 per cent was determined by intentional activities such as pursuing goals, looking at things optimistically, and being physically active.

...[T]he main conclusions drawn from the three studies were that changing circumstances and engaging in happiness related activities both offer a boost to one’s happiness, but that people habituate to circumstantial changes whereas continuing the activities sustained increases in happiness, subjective well-being, and psychological well-being.

In other words, our data suggest that effort and hard work offer the most promising route to happiness. In contrast, simply altering one’s superficial circumstances (assuming they are already reasonably good) may have little lasting effect on well-being.

I'd not be convinced with one study, after all the percentages here are highly debatable. Yet the conventional wisdom does show us the amazing adaptability of human being that a one-time bump will only have very limited impact on our well-being.

What it means to be a liberal?

From Chicago Tribute a law professor tries to clear the name for liberals. Of his 10 propositions of what liberals stand for, the top one rings very much true to me:

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset any fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

There have been many times I reflected and took a turn in a my life when I discovered my own ignorance. I used to think Bill O'Reilly was honest and independent.

When I look at the people that have shaped my way of thinking in some way or other, Bill Maher, Karl Weick, Carl Jung, and Tyler Cowen recently, they tend to have one thing in common that they admit that they are not sure about their own truths, and they question how others can be so sure. In a world of vast uncertainties, having concrete rules is one way of wading through the jungles, but you run the risks of dogmatizing your thinking and missing the richness and nuances of life. Trial-and-error, on the other hand, could be untidy and sometime painful, but it's likely to more fruitful in the end.

Phelps on Capitalism

Strike the iron while it's hot. Ned Phelps, announced yesterday as this year's winner of Nobel prize in economics, writes on capitalism in today's WSJ. In the name of an 'extended' Rawlsian social welfare model, he defends the free capitalism first on the ground of improving the well-being of those at economic bottom, and then of not depriving the creative freedom of entrepreneurs. This is quite an interesting take and it makes some sense to me, but I tend to disagree with his implication that the second justification is as important as the first one.

The concept that people need problem-solving and intellectual development originates in Europe: There is the classical Aristotle, who writes of the "development of talents"; later the Renaissance figure Cellini, who jubilates in achievement; and Cervantes, who evokes vitality and challenge. In the 20th century, Alfred Marshall observed that the job is in the worker's thoughts for most of the day. And Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1933 that the time will soon come when more satisfaction derives from the job than from consuming. The American application of this Aristotelian perspective is the thesis that most, if not all, of such self-realization in modern societies can come only from a career....

We all feel good to see people freed to pursue their dreams. Yet Hayek and Ayn Rand went too far in taking such freedom to be an absolute, the consequences be damned. In judging whether a nation's economic system is acceptable, its consequences for the prospects of the realization of people's dreams matter, too. Since the economy is a system in which people interact, the endeavors of some may damage the prospects of others. So a persuasive justification of well-functioning capitalism must be grounded on its all its consequences, not just those called freedoms.

To argue that the consequences of capitalism are just requires some conception of economic justice. I broadly subscribe to the conception of economic justice in the work by John Rawls. In any organization of the economy, the participants will score unequally in how far they manage to go in their personal growth. An organization that leaves the bottom score lower than it would be under another feasible organization is unjust. So a new organization that raised the scores of some, though at the expense of reducing scores at the bottom, would not be justified. Yet a high score is just if it does not hurt others. "Envy is the vice of mankind," said Kant, whom Rawls greatly dmired.

...[S]uppose the wage of the lowest- paid workers was foreseen to be reduced over the entire future by innovations conceived by entrepreneurs. Are those whose dream is to find personal development through a career as an entrepreneur not to be permitted to pursue their dream? To respond, we have to go outside Rawls's classical model, in which work is all about money. In an economy in which entrepreneurs are forbidden to pursue their self-realization, they have the bottom scores in self-realization -- no matter if they take paying jobs instead -- and that counts whether or not they were born the "least advantaged." So even if their activities did come at the expense of the lowest-paid workers, Rawlsian justice in this extended sense requires that entrepreneurs be accorded enough opportunity to raise their self-realization score up to the level of the lowest-paid workers -- and higher, of course, if workers are not damaged by support for entrepreneurship. In this case, too, then, the introduction of entrepreneurial dynamism serves to raise Rawls's bottom scores.

I conclude that capitalism is justified -- normally by the expectable benefits to the lowest-paid workers but, failing that, by the injustice of depriving entrepreneurial types (as well as other creative people) of opportunities for their self-expression.

This article argues more from a philosophical than an economic point of view. I think at issue here is his belief that "more satisfaction derives from the job than from consuming". This is a very bold statement and how much it is true for an average person is highly debatable. For a deep and rich thinker like Phelps himself, I am positive that he gets more satisfication from publishing a highly influencial paper than from a nice car or house, more from the recognition of Noble award than the actual $1.3 million prize. But that's him, I doubt this is the case for a creative entrepreneur who dreams up to make a fortune.

This is a well-written and stimulating piece of work nonetheless. I also get a taste of his complex and sometime hard-to-pin-down style of writing, I am sure we will see more of his works in the future.

Fundamental Attribution Error, another example

Mankiw blogged on this a few months back, and here is another example from Freaknomics, the punch line here is:

...[i]t also suggests an interesting psychological element: we are probably more willing to identify and exploit a flaw in those whom we have already deemed very flawed.

I just experienced a similar bias the other day while I was reading a blog: it's one of Mankiw's post to defend his leaving the post of CEA chair, but in a hurry I thought I was reading Thoma's blog(I use Google Reader so all my econ blogs are in one group), and I completely misread the blog as the opposite before I said to myself "wait a minute..." and realized what's going on.

I tend to think I am a fairly open-minded person, but still my reading, or absorbing of information in general, is quite selective based on my own filters. No wonder one of the most common career pitfalls is the failure to look from other people's perspective.

Classic ethics issue

The flu season is around the corner again. If you have only limited supply of flu shots, how would you ration them? The conventional wisdom is that you vaccinate the young and elderly first. But there is some challenge to this in today's WSJ:

First, ethics. In May, scientists at the National Institutes of Health stirred things up with a paper calling into question the policy that aims to save the most lives by first vaccinating the old, the very young and the sick, putting last those who are two to 64 years of age.

The value of a life, they argued, depends on age. A 60-year-old has invested a lot (measured by education and experience) in his life, but has also reaped most of the returns. A child has minimal investment. A 20-year-old has great investment but has reaped almost none of the returns. Conclusion: To maximize investment in a life plus years of life left, 13- to 40-year-olds should have first claim on rationed vaccine, explains NIH's Ezekiel Emanuel.

Second, efficacy. Let's leave aside the fraught question of the value of a life. Evidence keeps accumulating that vaccinating the elderly might not even be the best strategy for minimizing deaths. The reason is that during some flu pandemics, the mortality rate among the elderly is hardly higher than during nonpandemic years. The flu certainly kills some old people, says Dr. Emanuel, but many would have died anyway. In addition, they may not benefit from flu vaccines as much as is assumed: A 2006 study found that the antibody response by people over 65 is less than half that in young adults.

Critics reply that the elderly are more likely to die if they get the flu, so ethics requires you protect them, the most vulnerable, first. Indeed, in the 1957 and 1968 pandemics, the very young and very old had the highest flu-mortality rates. But in the 1918 pandemic, 20- to 40-year-olds and children under five had the highest mortality rate. The elderly were more likely to either not become infected or to survive if they did, perhaps because only someone with a sturdy immune system lived to a ripe old age back then.

In this regard I wish we were living in a communist Utopia where everybody always gets what he/she desires. We are not. Resources are scarce and we have to make choices every day, one way or the other. A lot of times the frontier we face is just unpleasant that we have to make tough choices. Some people rely more on morals and ethics to balance the tradeoff, while others tend to adopt a more utilitarian approach. One is not necessarily superior to the other and I admit that the moralist and utilitarian in me are fighting all the time. However, the dominant libertarian in me is satisfied as long as people are making those choices by their own.

Who is right, stock or bond trader?

It's very interesting that stock market and bond market are painting quite different pictures about US economy: Dow Jones index just reached all-time high yesterday while the 10-year bond yield has been declining in the past a few months.

Here is what this week's Economist says:

It is hard to see how both the bond and equity markets can be right. Equity investors seem to assume that the global economy will display the same resilience as it has in recent years; taking that view has been a bet that has paid off since 2003. But the bond markets almost have an each-way bet on a slowdown: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the Fed doesn't get you, then
housing must.”

The forecasting record of bond markets is not perfect: remember the deflation scare of 2003? But given the scale of the decline in yields, and the fickleness of stock markets, it would be foolish to bet against the bond market's judgment.

Here is how Econbrowser tries to reconcile the seemingly conflicting signals:

Well, here's a story that I believe could reconcile everything. The housing slowdown is significant, real, and upon us now, but this is as bad as it's going to get. Inflation numbers will begin to look better, allowing the Fed some breathing room to bring rates down slightly, averting a complete meltdown in housing. We get slower real economic growth, the biggest burden of which is borne by homebuilders. But the benefits of taming inflation bring some cheer to the rest of Wall Street and perhaps Main Street.

In other words, markets seem to believe that Bernanke is going to pull off the soft landing after all-- slower real growth for sure, lower inflation, but no recession.

On this, the markets may or may not prove to be right. But I don't see any other way to try to tell their story.

I'd put more confidence in bond market: stock market tends to be a lot more volatile than bond market thus a less reliable leading indicator. Another reason I am siding more with bond traders is that I think housing cooldown/correction/slump is far from over: the price runup during the past a few years is just too big to be corrected in short time and it's too soon to say the worst is behind us.

Shame, Revisited

I first came to ponder on shame a few years back when I was reading "The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back: Overcoming the Behavior Patterns That Keep You From Getting Ahead ". There was a paragraph talking about shame that struck me somehow, it goes like "you are guilty of something you did, but you are ashamed of yourself.". It had never occurred to me like this, so I took some time to think about it. I thought I got what the author intends to say there, but probably I did not really, or at least I did not internalize it at that time.

So when I came cross this speech from a Jungian analyst this morning, it grasped my attention right away, and I read it twice and highlighted my favorite lines to make sure I got it this time :).

In a nutshell, at a psycobiology level shame is human's automatic (and painful) mechanism to pull us away from joyment when there is an impediment to our joy. In that sense a little bit of shame does some good in keeping us safe and ethical, i.e., shame has its biology utility from an evolutionary perspective. At a psychoanalysis level, shame is our response to the failure in attaining the ideal self: if we fail to live up to our perfect image, we experience a sense of inferiority, flaw and defeat, then we have the feelings of shame. Since shame is such a painful thing, no wonder we have so many defenses against shame: withdrawal, avoidance, attacking others, or attacking self. Pathological narcissism, fundamentalism(as the defense of the shame of ignorance), rage, envy, are all our defenses against shame, one way or the other. Shame comes with our consciousness, and the healthy way to deal with it is to recognize the dark aspects of our personality, and there is nothing to be ashamed of being ashamed, it's such a universal phenomena and we don't have to spend so much effort to defend or disguise it.

Here is my excerpt of this speech:

...[P]robably everyone who has ever been in front of a group to talk, with the expectation of having something of substance to say, has experienced some degree of stage fright, or performance anxiety. The same holds for any kind of performance-- the audience is listening, and watching. Performance anxiety is practically a universal fear. You know it. What is it we're afraid of? Failure to be sure, but what's that? It's one thing to fail and quite another to screw up somehow and embarrass--no, humiliate--ourselves in front of other people. We're scared of that. We'll look foolish or stupid or be boring, and be ashamed. People will avoid us, shun us and even ridicule us behind our back where we are defenseless, and leave us alone to imagine the worst. Fear of shame, you'll hear it called shame-anxiety, is every bit as potent as the fear of panic. And the wish to avoid the experience of shame is so powerful that just the threat of it evokes enormous effort to prevent its emergence.

In spite of this power, it isn't obvious, a lot of the time, that we're dealing with shame. The word itself comes from a word that means "to cover," that is, to hide. And shame truly is the hidden affect. The parts of ourselves we wish to hide are the shameful parts, and we also wish to hide the fact that we are ashamed. If we can't prevent it, we hide it. In common language when we talk about embarrassment, humiliation, or mortification we are talking about shame. Loss of face, disgrace, and dishonor are close relatives in the family of shame.

...[I] want to make a distinction here between shame and guilt. They may appear together, but they are not quite the same. Guilt comes from violating a rule or standard, committing an offense, a trespass. To feel guilty requires a conscience or superego. Guilt is about what we do; it motivates confession, it deserves punishment, and it is relieved by restitution and forgiveness. Shame is something deeper. It is about who we are; it motivates concealment, it deserves dismemberment, there is no restitution, and it is relieved only by acceptance. One can be guilty and feel guilty without being ashamed, and one can feel shame without feeling guilty or having done anything to feel guilty about. One can do things that bring on shame, but it is what the action means to the actor or about the actor that brings on the affect, rather than the act itself....

Having referred to shame as affect, it will probably help the conversation at this point if I tell you what I mean by "affect." ......Affect is a physiological event occurring involuntarily in the body as a response to stimulus. It results from activity in the limbic system of the brain and not the cerebral cortex, and it is mediated by the autonomic nervous system, not the voluntary motor pathways. That is to say, in psychological language, that the origin of affect is in the unconscious. ....

Shame is one of the primary affects... The mechanism for the experience of shame is carried in the genes, and built into the biological organism. It is universal, at least among humans. It is a part of our makeup. Like the other primary affects shame has its characteristic physical expression. The chest sags, the body tends to crumple and sink and is momentarily awkward and discoordinated, the head drops, the gaze is averted, most often downward, blood vessels dilate in the face, and there is a temporary mental disorganization so that one cannot think logically or clearly. Blushing, which results from the dilation of blood vessels in the face, is the hallmark of embarrassment. There is a spectrum of shame. As shame goes, embarrassment is on the mild side, and has been called "skin shame." When we are alone or in an introverted mode, or with another person whose acceptance makes us safe, we may open to a "deep shame" which turns to anguish and sobbing.

Shame is an outer experience. Shame in the presence of other people, gives us the impulse to run away and hide. We don't belong, we don't deserve to be here, we are no good. We are exposed, to be condemned and expelled from the others, be they individuals, groups, or the whole human race. We are cast out, alone, and cut off, and the cause of our dismemberment is our own deficiency or deformity or constitutional inadequacy, perhaps our exhibitionism. This is humiliation--when the shame is most severe and when it has to do with others. There's nothing we can do. When the affect comes suddenly, acutely, as it most often does, it may seem as if the ground has opened up beneath our feet and we have sunk into a hole, if only we could disappear in it....

Shame is an inner experience. It can come when no one else is around. There's a physical sinking sensation that's something like falling into a pool of our own water, like we are dissolving. It comes with the sudden realization that we are not the person we thought we were. We might even be enjoying some good fortune when seemingly out of nowhere comes the knowledge of our unworthiness, this heretofore unthought inner reality. We don't deserve to be here-- who do I think I am? Who did I think I was? There's no one to hide from, nothing to hide from, nowhere to go, and certainly no going back. That person is mortified, dead. Whatever comes next, if anything does, will have to be new.

Such pain. It makes us want to turn away, to stop listening, to leave, to change the subject. We are even ashamed of those who are ashamed and we don't want them around us. It can be a contagious affect. We'll do just about anything to avoid it; like drugs, for example, or replacing shame with rage or turning it into envy. It has been said that for adults, the most common stimulus to rage is humiliation. And when envy focuses on the powerful, intolerable other, possessor of the goods, our attention is drawn away from our weak, inferior selves, holding only shame.

Is it surprising that there are many defenses against shame? Donald Nathanson, the psychiatrist who has written most comprehensively about shame, has grouped the defenses against it into four areas. These areas are withdrawal, avoidance (which can take many different forms), attacking others, and attacking the self. There isn't time to go into these here, but let me just say that if you read his descriptions of defenses against shame you can see in slightly different language, practically all of what psychoanalysts have called the ego defense mechanisms. They are the ways we protect the integrity of our individual point of view and conscious functioning. It makes sense that our psychological defenses against overwhelming anxiety and threats of castration or disintegration would also protect us from overwhelming shame and threats of dismemberment or dissolution. Here's a thought: if you're about to be castrated you are afraid, but if you're already castrated you're ashamed.

We have called shame a "primary affect," and said it is built into the system, our system, and if that is the case then shame surely has some biological utility.....Whenever an impediment to the flow of positive affect occurs, while at the same time the stimulus for the interest or enjoyment continues, the affect program for shame-humiliation is triggered. Shame affect is a highly painful mechanism that operates to pull the organism away from whatever might interest it or make it content. It turns us away from pleasure when the desire for and conditions for pleasure are still present. Triggered by an impediment to positive affect, shame amplifies that impediment to any further positive affect....shame "is a biological system by which the organism controls its affective output so that it will not remain interested or content when it may not be safe to do so.... It protects an organism from its growing avidity for positive affect.".....We should say here that a little shame is good for you--"signal shame" they call it. A whiff of shame alerts us to the danger ahead, allowing us to make the change in attitude or action that will avoid the full affect. It keeps us ethical.

So the biological mechanism for shame is built into the organism. Impediments to pleasure trigger the shame system and then become attached to it in our memory. We then have images attached to shame, which we can call "affect images." A Jungian view would be that the potential for universally common impediments to pleasure, like loss of parent's approval, are already present in the psyche, built in, as archetypes. And the affect images are the conscious manifestations of the archetypal forms. That is to say, when impediments to pleasure trigger shame and an affect image is created, some innate potential of the psyche is being brought to life. The psyche is not just the victim of experience here. Enough of that.

It's easier to understand "impediments to pleasure," I think, if we think of pleasure as being simply the maintenance of a positive feeling in ourself or about ourself, so that an impediment is anything that interrupts the feeling. Over time, in Nathanson's view, the accumulation or repetition of affect images gives conscious cognitive meaning to our affective experience. Let's say you're less than two years old and you like your body and you stroll buck naked into the middle of the living room where your parents are having a party. Oops! Shame on you. Where are your pants? You're not feeling so good anymore. The idea of exposing your genitals in public and the affect of shame are thereby joined, if they weren't already. According to Nathanson, the experience of affect doesn't depend on cognitive appraisal; the cognitive appraisal is the interpretation of the experience. We think it and know what it is after we experience it, if at all. Nathanson says, for instance, that when our desires consistently overreach our ability to fulfill them, "shame produces a sense of an incompetent self." Thus, the affect precedes the sense of self.

Shame. In the title of his 1989 book, Morrison calls it, The Underside of Narcissism . "Shame," he says, "is the principal ubiquitous affect that accompanies and defines" the condition of narcissistic vulnerability. In other words, the more shame you have the more shakey is your sense of self. Shame is about the self. It is "a response to failure in attaining the shape of the ideal self," Morrison says. Such failure might express itself in words like, "My mother didn't admire me. I am not the sort of person I could admire." So, if we are narcissistically vulnerable and if we fail to live up to the image of who we think we ought to be, we experience a sense of inferiority, defeat, flaw or weakness, and then we have the feeling of shame. Put another way, if sustaining the flow of positive affect requires an image of a basically good self (let's say a good enough self), then whatever interferes with that self image will trigger shame. Even healthy people, Morrison says, can experience shame from "microfailures in meeting the aspirations of the relatively cohesive and differentiated ideal self."

So where are we with shame so far? Shame is the primary painful affect of unpleasure that destroys whatever good feeling we may have about ourselves. It can be useful, at least in small amounts. In its full blown forms of humiliation or mortification, it so disrupts our function that the ego is temporarily dissolved and dead. Shame comes with consciousness, particularly self consciousness--self consciousness that is the awareness of our constitutional inadequacy, our essential inferiority, worthlessness and evil. It is the affect of knowing the shadow. It comes with dismemberment, in the sense of being cut off from an essential source of survival, be it mother, clan, community, self, God, or other, and it comes with dismemberment also in the sense of splitting off or repressing the shameful part. Thy right hand hath offended thee, and thou hast cut it off.

...[I] have noticed that people who are just learning psychotherapy or psychoanalysis are more prone to be strong advocates of a single theory than those who are more experienced and initiated. It's awfully hard to know nothing when everybody around you seems to know something, and so you scramble hard to get some structure for your thinking, to learn something that will overcome your ignorance and the shame of it. In this case adopting and defending a single theory is probably a necessary early phase in the learning process. But getting stuck in this phase can be dangerous and ultimately self-defeating.

Like religious fundamentalism, psychoanalytic fundamentalism is a defense against shame. It is my opinion that the historical tendency of schools of psychoanalysis to protect their theoretical beliefs with fundamentalist attitudes reflects the inferiority and megalomania, the shame and grandiosity, of beginning consciousness. It was an early phase in the evolution of our collective learning about ourselves which may now give way to more openness, humility. and broadness of mind.

...[I]n conclusion, I want to say something about accepting shame, and the shameful part of oneself. Recognizing that shame is universally human and that the experience of it does not in fact separate us or make us different from the rest of the people may make it unnecessary to be ashamed of being ashamed. That's a start. When we can recognize and acknowledge that we feel shame we can stop defending against it so hard, and then we have a chance to encounter the shameful part that is the shadow. "Fat chance," some would say. Jung says in "Aion" and I quote: "The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge..." It is not an easy task.