First Monday of the month, October through May, 7:45 PM
4612 49th ST NW, Washington DC

The overarching frame of reference for this year of study is to deepen our understanding of affect regulation in the context of humiliation, rage, and related experience.

Members who attend this study group will be able to:

  1. Discuss an ethnographic view of emotion, particularly humiliation.
  2. Describe the social and political contexts generating emotion in our culture and in specific families that are idiosyncratic in their meaning.
  3. Discuss the intersection of humiliation that is political vs. racist/racial in its nature.
  4. Describe the delicacy between experiences of humiliation and the budding of hope for self-worth in the therapeutic relationship, both potentials and pitfalls.
  5. Describe the role of the social bond in shame as distinct from guilt.
  6. Describe the potential value of shame being held by the “analytic system” rather than patient or analyst.
  7. Discuss how repression/dissociation of shame is related to humiliated fury.
  8. Describe the role of humiliated fury in the genesis of conflict and violence.
  9. Describe the relationship between humiliation and narcissism.
  10. Describe how humiliation experience relates the patient’s actions and attitudes in regard to seeing and being seen in the analytic setting.
  11. Describe the significance of humiliation being born out of the hostile intent of another.
  12. Explain the significance of how humiliation may be distinguished from shame.
  13. Describe the link between childhood abuse and battering behavior in perpetrators.
  14. Discuss shame-rage and the link to battering behaviors in perpetrators.
  15. Describe the link between trauma, humiliation, and aggression in political conflict.
  16. Discuss the problem of impaired mourning processes in the generation of political conflict.