Introducing a new organizing concept, metaphor, or construction into an established system of discourse is never an easy task, particularly in the psychotherapeutic world where competition among paradigms nearly always runs high. It is a little like trying to add one more book to an already full bookcase. Do we remove something to make room, and if so which treasured volume will have to go? Do we somehow cram it in where it properly belongs, and if so how do we tell where that is? Or is this newcomer by chance unique or important enough to warrant opening up a whole new bookcase? The more help we can get with those questions the more likely we are to shelve the volume properly rather than toss it onto the couch and wait for a better day.Facing Shame: Families In Recovery' is both such a concept and such a book. Its great strength is the idea of shame, which holds considerable promise as a working therapeutic metaphor and has not been talked about much before. Its weakness is that as a book it does not "hold" the idea as clearly and carefully as it needs to in order to place it securely on the crowded shelves of therapeutic theory and practice. In a curious way the book qua book illustrates the family dynamic it is trying to describe: a certain vagueness about its boundaries keeps it from functioning the way it otherwise might. That, however, is to anticipate a great deal that needs to be said about an important contribution in the notion of "shame" as a way of understanding and working with certain troubled families.Shame, as the authors develop the idea, partakes of two polarities (whose relationship is not always clear). On the one hand, it is the opposite of "respect," and the book opens with a discussion of the differences between "respectful" and "shame-bound" family systems. On the other hand, taking a page from cultural anthropology, shame is placed over against "guilt" so that "shame is an inner sense of being completely diminished or insufficient as a person" while "guilt is the developmentally more mature, though painful, feeling of regret one has about behavior that has violated a personal value" (p. 5). The appropriate response to guilt is some form of acknowledgement and reparation, so that while 'Merle A.
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