See! Those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart . . . . Then recognize your Shame. So wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in his short story 'The Haunted Mind,' back when the capacity to feel shame was still valued as a mark of good character.

But, as Hollywood's happy-ending remake of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter amply demonstrates, those days may be gone for good. The currently popular thinking in therapeutic circles rejects shame as a useful social reaction, seeing it instead, as psychiatrist Andrew Morrison puts it, as a modern-day 'scourge . . . that will continue to create havoc for the foreseeable future.'

Morrison, author of the forthcoming Culture of Shame (Ballantine, 1996), and psychologist Michael P. Nichols, author of the recent No Place to Hide (Prometheus, 1995), are both careful to distinguish between guilt (feeling bad about something you have done) and shame (feeling that you are entirely unworthy and unlovable). And it is the latter condition--sometimes also called narcissistic shame--that social worker Vicki Underland-Rosow in Shame: Spiritual Suicide (Waterford, 1995) calls 'an unacknowledged national epidemic that is wreaking havoc on our entire society,' a societal malaise leading to 'spiritual suicide on a massive scale.'

Although not all the authors mentioned here wax quite so catastrophic, they do seem to agree that this newly defined social scourge is closely connected to our society's rising incidence of depression, addictions, and eating disorders, being 'both cause and effect' of these maladies, as Morrison puts it. Indeed, adds Morrison, the popularity of tell-all TV talk shows in which 'participants are eager to explain their various humiliations and [thus] attain some degree of acceptance and relief' provides the ultimate evidence for how thoroughly shame has permeated our culture.

But is shame really at the heart of all our problems? Some therapists, including Susan Miller, author of The Shame Experience (Analytic Press, 1993), are willing to concede that a few too many pathologies may have been attributed to shame recently, and that 'as people have been trying to give shame its due . . . there has been a tendency for the pendulum to swing too far, to believe that everything is shame.'