Is it true that humiliation, shame and embarrassment are 'the central emotions of everyday social existence'? It is not obviously false. To say that these emotions are central is not to say that they are the most often felt; their centrality may lie in the strength of our desire to avoid them. William Miller's suggestion has a creeping plausibility - in the playground, among teenagers, among mid-life colleagues, in the retirement home. It has a serious claim to express a human universal, valid for all societies, with origins in the deep past of the species, and echoes in the social hierarchies of non-human primates. There is no doubt about the importance in human life of the negative emotions that are specially (although not unbreakably) connected to awareness of how the self appears to others. The problem starts early: one-year-olds have a startling capacity for self-consciousness; their grasp of what it is to lose face or feel foolish is striking for seeming, but not being, precocious.

LRB 6 October 1994 | PDF Download