Shame & Guilt

About the Book

Shame & Guilt explores the differences between these two painful but inevitable experiences. Both guilt and shame involve feeling "bad"-feeling bad about one's actions (or omissions) in the case of guilt; feeling bad about one's self in shame. The deep meaning of the word bad is "unable to fit": unable to fit into some external context in the case of guilt, unable to fit into one's own being in the case of shame.

Human experience offers two different ways of discovering that one does not "fit," of feeling "bad." Each has to do with the boundaries of the human condition. But there are two kinds of boundaries, and it is important to recognize their difference, the difference between rules and goals. For though the human condition is bounded, recognizing that reality can be either a choking, tightening experience or it can lead to the discovery of a new freedom.

True, shame's negative side points up failure and falling short, but shame also entails something positive: insight into the reality of the human condition. The experience of shame lays bare the essential paradox that inheres in being human: to be human is to be caught in a contradictory tension between the pull to the unlimited, the more-than-human, and the drag of the merely limited, the less-than-human.

Shame's healing is to be found in the discovery of how that paradox can be lived creatively in ways that find other human beings to be not the problem in shame, but its solution.

About the Author

Ernest Kurtz, who completed his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 1978, was the first researcher to be granted full access to the archives of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book that resulted, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (1979), published forty years after the publication of the A.A. Big Book, is still the classic work on the subject. His book on the spiritual life?Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories (1992)?is equally well known, and has also been an enduring best seller through the years since it appeared.

He has also contributed numerous articles to scholarly journals on the topic of alcoholism and its treatment, and on the spiritual component of the A.A. approach. A recent selection of some of his articles and essays can be found in Ernest Kurtz, The Collected Ernie Kurtz (Wheeling, West Virginia: Bishop of Books, 1999).