Shame and its vicissitudes: Its spiritual, theological and psychological implications and its transformative potential

This dissertation builds a case for the centrality of the affect of shame in human life, and its importance in understanding the psychic power, meaning and transformative potential of the Christian Incarnation. It draws upon scriptural descriptions of the life, words, trial and passion of Jesus to demonstrate that he—or at least the figure that the gospelers described—experienced the sting of shame at many points in his life and death. It discusses theological understandings of the human shame experience, and attempts to relate these theological understandings and lived spiritual experience to psychological underpinnings of shame in human life. This dissertation claims that shame is an integral and inevitable part of the human condition, and indeed is at the core of most profound religious conversion experience. In that sense, shame can draw us to God. Depth psychologists, theologians and mystics have seen that when shame experience is honestly confronted instead of bypassed and defended against, it is transformative and revelatory of identity because it is the affect closest to the experienced self. Shame originates, most fundamentally, out of the tension between our finite, creaturely nature and our consciousness. Honest negotiation of the shame affect can result in an expanded sense of self, as well as the experience of oceanic unity with God.