Where Is Shame Located?

On Emotions Between Brain, Body, and Interpretation

While I was working on my doctoral dissertation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, I once entered into a conversation with a Swedish professor of physiology. Among other things, he studied photons and was involved in developing a microchip that could be implanted in the retina of people with severe visual impairment. The chip could not restore ordinary vision, but it could produce a perception of light.

I was impressed by his research. It demonstrated what scientific knowledge can accomplish when a problem can be clearly defined, its mechanisms investigated, and technology adapted to the physiology of the body. The professor, however, was far less impressed by my research. I was conducting a hermeneutic study of shame, particularly of how shame is experienced, interpreted, and given meaning in people’s lives. He did not consider this sufficiently scientific. Instead, he said, I ought to find out where shame was located in the brain and then develop a medicine capable of removing it.

I still remember that conversation. Not because the professor’s view was unusual, but because he expressed so clearly a fundamental tension between two scientific traditions. He asked where shame was located. I asked what shame meant.

Behind these two questions lay different assumptions about what an emotion actually is.

By hermeneutics, I do not primarily mean a method for interpreting texts, but a philosophical tradition—from Dilthey and Heidegger to Gadamer and Ricoeur—that examines how human beings understand their own experience, and how this understanding is always historical, linguistic, and interpretive. Where the physiologist wanted to identify the cause of shame, the hermeneutic thinker would ask about its meaning.

The Dream of a Precise Address

The natural sciences have made great progress by locating bodily functions. The heart pumps blood. The retina registers light. Particular nerve cells transmit particular signals. When a function fails, it is often possible to identify the damage and attempt to repair or compensate for it.

It was therefore not unreasonable for the physiologist to approach shame in the same way. If shame were caused by activity in a clearly defined area of the brain, it might be possible to influence that area chemically or electrically. Shame could then be treated like other bodily disorders: first locate the mechanism, then develop the intervention.

The problem arises when this model is made the only scientific way of understanding emotions. Shame is not an object hidden somewhere in the brain. Nor is it simply a reaction to one particular signal. Shame may emerge in the encounter between bodily activation, memory, social norms, previous experience, the gaze of others, and a person’s understanding of themselves.

This does not mean that shame is detached from the brain. Without the brain, the nervous system, and the body, there are no human emotions. But it does not follow that the meaning of an emotion can be reduced to the activity of particular nerve cells.

A New Neuroscientific Understanding

In the perspective article “The Hidden Logic of Emotion,” recently published in Science, Xiaowei Gu and Joshua P. Johansen attempt to develop a model that connects biological emotional states with subjective emotional experience. They use the term internal emotion models to describe neural representations that integrate bodily states, sensory impressions, previous learning, and the context in which a situation occurs.

The article is particularly concerned with anxiety, threat responses, and trauma, and with how research across different species may form part of a shared research programme. The authors seek to identify mechanisms that can be studied in both animals and humans without claiming that human emotional experience can be reduced to simple animal models.

Gu and Johansen point out that emotional states often endure beyond the event that triggered them. They vary in intensity and coordinate both behaviour and physiology. Moreover, the brain does not respond only to immediate danger. It uses previous experience, bodily signals, and context to draw conclusions about what may be dangerous or safe.

The article thus seeks to build a bridge between simple reactive responses and the more complex subjective experience of emotion.

This is not a hermeneutic theory. The authors still investigate emotions as biological and measurable processes. Yet their understanding has moved far beyond the idea that an emotion can be found simply by searching for one particular point in the brain.

Shame has no single address.

The Dog That Is Still There

Gu and Johansen use the example of a person who is attacked by a dog. The attack triggers immediate defensive responses: increased heart rate and breathing, bodily tension, and an urge to flee. But the emotional state may persist after the dog is gone.

Later, the person may become anxious when passing the house where the dog lived, meeting the dog’s owner, or entering the street where the attack occurred. None of these circumstances is in itself dangerous. They have acquired significance because the brain associates them with the earlier event. If the person learns that the dog has moved away, the anxiety may diminish. The emotional response changes when the understanding of the situation changes.

The example shows that emotions are not merely direct responses to what is immediately before us. We also react to what we assume, remember, and imagine. The body may mobilise for defence before we fully understand why. At the same time, new experience and new knowledge may alter the response.

The article is not primarily about shame. I am the one who reads shame into this model. But that is precisely what makes it interesting.

Shame may also persist long after the event that triggered it has ended. It may be reawakened by a facial expression, a voice, a smell, a bodily sensation, or a social situation. The reaction may be powerful even when the person cannot immediately explain it.

Yet shame is more than a learned alarm response.

Fear asks: Am I in danger?

Shame asks: What kind of person am I?

Shame concerns not only what may happen to me, but who I experience myself to be in the gaze of others and in my own gaze. It touches upon dignity, belonging, and the right to appear among other human beings.

It is helpful here to distinguish shame from a related but different experience: guilt. Guilt typically concerns an action: I have done something wrong. Shame more often concerns the self: There is something wrong with me.

Guilt may therefore, at least in principle, lead to acknowledgement, reparation, and forgiveness, while shame more easily becomes embedded in a person’s self-understanding. This may also explain why people who have been violated can carry a shame that does not correspond to their moral responsibility.

The guilt belongs to the perpetrator. The shame may become the victim’s.

Different Disciplines See Different Aspects

Physiology examines what happens in the body and brain. Psychology investigates, among other things, learning, memory, evaluation, and regulation. Sociology asks how norms, power, and social belonging shape emotions. Hermeneutics examines how people understand their experience and what meaning it acquires in a lived life. Philosophy also asks what we ought to do with this knowledge, and how responsibility, guilt, and dignity should be understood.

These disciplines do not necessarily stand in opposition to one another. The conflict arises when one tradition makes its own question the only valid one.

When the physiologist asks where shame is located in the brain, he is asking an important question. He may help explain why shame becomes bodily persistent, why it is activated so quickly, and why some people find it more difficult than others to regulate it.

But the question is not sufficient.

To understand shame, we must also ask what the person has experienced, how the experience has been interpreted, which social norms are at work, and who originally placed the shame upon the person who now carries it.

This becomes particularly clear when shame follows abuse and violation. The person who has been subjected to abuse may experience themselves as contaminated, guilty, or inferior. The body may respond with anxiety, withdrawal, and intense activation. Such reactions can be investigated neuroscientifically. But neuroscience alone cannot determine who bears responsibility.

Here we encounter a boundary between causal explanation and moral understanding.

The Face of the Other

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that the face of the other calls us to responsibility—before every argument and before every calculation. For Levinas, the face is not merely the visible human face. It expresses the other person’s vulnerability and confronts me with a demand: I cannot treat this human being as though they were merely one object among others.

In this light, violation may be understood as a rejection of the ethical appeal of the other. The person who violates another does not allow themselves to be stopped by the other’s vulnerability. The other is not encountered as a human being whose value places limits upon my actions.

The violated person has encountered a gaze that reduced her, or a gaze that refused to see her as a whole human being. What may open the way towards healing is therefore not only an explanation, but a new encounter in which she is not reduced to what was done to her. She must be met as a human being whose dignity the violation could not destroy.

Medical treatment may reduce anxiety, sleep difficulties, or bodily hyperarousal. This may be both necessary and valuable. But medicine cannot by itself tell the violated person:

What happened was not your fault. The shame you carry does not belong to you.

This is not primarily a chemical message. It is a moral and relational recognition. It must be expressed, understood, and gradually incorporated into the person’s own story about themselves.

Shame as Being Made into an It

Martin Buber distinguished between two fundamental ways of relating to the world: I–Thou and I–It.

In the I–Thou relation, I encounter the other as a whole person, someone who responds and to whom I must respond. In the I–It relation, I encounter the other as an object: something that can be described, evaluated, explained, or used.

We cannot live without I–It relations. Science, planning, and practical action require us to regard parts of the world as objects. The problem arises when this becomes the only way in which we encounter another human being.

In the light of Buber, shame may be understood as the experience of being reduced to an It, whether in the gaze of another or in one’s own gaze. The person who feels shame often no longer experiences themselves as being met as a complete human being, but as something observed, assessed, and found deficient.

This gaze may continue to exert its power long after the other person is gone. I have made it my own. I regard myself from the outside, as an object to be examined and judged. I see myself as an It.

A way out of shame may therefore, in Buber’s language, be described as a movement back towards I–Thou. It requires another person who meets me not merely as a case to be explained or treated, but as a Thou—someone capable of responding and who deserves a response.

No brain scan can accomplish this movement on its own. It takes place between human beings, in an encounter.

To Explain Is Not the Same as to Understand

The traditional distinction between the natural sciences and hermeneutics is often described as a distinction between explanation and understanding. The natural sciences explain how something happens. Hermeneutics seeks to understand what it means.

Such a division can become too simple. Neuroscience must also interpret its findings, and hermeneutic research cannot ignore the body, biology, and causal relations. Yet the distinction points towards the need for more than one form of knowledge.

We can map the brain networks activated when a person experiences shame. We can measure heart rate, breathing, and hormonal changes. We can investigate how earlier experiences make certain situations especially distressing. All of this can provide important knowledge.

Yet we have not fully understood shame until we know what the person is ashamed of, whose gaze they have adopted, and what story the shame has become part of.

Two people may display similar patterns of bodily activation but experience the situation in entirely different ways. One is ashamed because he believes that he has violated another human being. The other is ashamed because she has been violated and has internalised the perpetrator’s gaze.

The bodily response may be similar. The moral meaning is fundamentally different.

A treatment that seeks only to reduce the intensity of the emotion may therefore overlook what the emotion expresses. Sometimes shame is groundless and destructive. At other times, it is intertwined with justified guilt after I have actually done something wrong.

In both cases, we must ask what the emotion means, whether responsibility has been correctly assigned, and what the person needs in order to live on.

Removing every painful emotion is not necessarily progress. Some emotions point towards responsibility, grief, or loss that must be acknowledged. Others are founded upon a false judgement of the self and must be challenged. What matters is not only how strongly a person feels, but what the feeling says—and whether it speaks the truth.

No Single Science Owns the Emotions

My conversation with the Swedish physiologist took place at a time when the biological and hermeneutic sciences often stood far apart. His research sought precise mechanisms. My research sought meaning in people’s stories and experiences.

The new article in Science does not erase the difference between these traditions. But it shows that neuroscience, too, is developing a more complex language. Emotions are no longer understood merely as automatic reactions to isolated stimuli. They are shaped through the interaction of body, brain, learning, expectation, and situation.

Here there may be a possible meeting place.

Neuroscience can show how emotional states are established, maintained, and altered. Hermeneutics can show how they acquire meaning in a person’s life. Psychology can investigate how experiences are learned and regulated. The social sciences can reveal the norms and power relations through which shame is distributed among people.

Practical philosophy can ask who bears responsibility, what justice requires, and how a person’s dignity may be restored.

None of these disciplines can, by itself, explain the hidden logic of emotion.

When the physiologist asked me where shame was located, I could not give him the address he wanted. Today, I might answer differently:

Shame is in the brain, because all human experience has a biological basis. It is in the body, as tension, anxiety, heat, cold, and the urge to hide. It is in memory and in the expectation of how others will see us. It is in language, norms, and relationships. And it is in the story a person has learned to tell about themselves.

Shame is biologically real, but it is not only biology.

That is why it cannot always be removed with a pill. Sometimes the body must be calmed, and sometimes memories must be processed. But often the story must also be told anew, responsibility placed where it belongs, and the person who carries shame met by a gaze that says Thou, not It.

That was not the address the physiologist was asking for.

But it is, as far as I can see, the closest answer I have.