James Gilligan Quote
It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling,' for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante's Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice---absolute coldness.
James Gilligan
It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling,' for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante's Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice---absolute coldness.
Tags:
humiliation, shame
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About James Gilligan
During his career, Gilligan has served as director for the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison system and as president of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He now lectures at the Department of Psychiatry, New York University. Gilligan is an adjunct professor at NYU Law and collegiate professor at NYU's College of Arts and Sciences. He has been on the faculty at NYU since 2002.
Previously, Gilligan was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, where he worked from 1966 to 2000. In 1977 he became the director of the Harvard Institute of Law and Psychiatry.
Gilligan was brought in as the medical director of the Massachusetts prison mental hospital in Bridgewater, Massachusetts because of the high suicide and murder rates within their prisons. When he left ten years later the rates of both had dropped to nearly zero.
Gilligan served as the psychiatric adviser to Martin Scorsese for the film, Shutter Island.