Peter Shabad, PhD
Trauma, Self-Shaming and Mourning
October 17-18, 2026
1132 S. Wabash Ave., Suite 502, Chicago
& ZOOM
Seminar Title: Trauma, Self-Shaming and Mourning
Seminar Description: In this course we will explore how self-shaming emerges in the aftermath of traumatic and chronically disillusioning experiences. Self-shaming can have profound inhibiting effects on the entire course of one’s life. We will devote special attention to how human beings transform their traumatic experiences outside of their control into shameful failures, in which they “blame the victim” in themselves for being a victim. Becoming the victim of one’s own self-punitive shame also leads to character passivity and interrelated dynamics of self-pity, envy, and eventually to resentment and a sense of entitlement to feeling owed by life. We will also examine how psychological symptoms are a non-verbal attempt to communicate and memorialize one’s traumatic experiences by soliciting witness to one’s lonely suffering. In the clinical section of the course, we will critically explore how diagnostic categories objectify the people we see in therapy. We will emphasize the importance of examining one’s countertransference, with special attention devoted to one’s omnipotent wish to fix the patient. in this regard, I will highlight the importance of understanding where one’s individual boundaries end and the patient’s begin, which form a respect for the patient’s freedom of self-determination. In this regard, we will also highlight important clinical tensions between developmental determinism and freedom of will, and corresponding countertransference tensions of love versus respect in the analyst’s attitude toward the patient. Finally, I will also highlight the importance of viewing clinical work as an ongoing, continually renewable process, which enables us to help facilitate the patient’s self-healing by learning how to replace self-shaming with an ethic of curiosity, inquiry, and ultimately self-accepting understanding. This radical self-acceptance of one’s inner life is a key element in the generative process of mourning.. In addition to analytic readings, we will also read Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych.
Peter Shabad, PhD is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. He is on the Teaching and Supervising Faculty of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and he is on the Faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is also Supervising and Training Analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is an Associate Editor on the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Dr. Shabad is co-editor of The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (IUP, 1989) and is the author of Despair and the Return of Hope: Echoes of Mourning in Psychotherapy (Aronson, 2001). He is the author of numerous papers and book chapters on diverse topics such as the psychological implications of death, loss and mourning, giving and receiving, shame, parental envy, resentment, and regret. Dr. Shabad’s new book Passion, Shame, and The Freedom To Become: Seizing The Vital Moment In Psychoanalysis (2024) was recently published by Routledge.
Readings:
Dostoevsky, F. (1864). Notes from the underground. In The Best Short Stories of Dostoevsky, (D. Magarshack, Trans). New York: Modern Library.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. Standard Edition: 243-258.
Rank, O. (1936). Ideological versus dynamic therapy. In Will Therapy, Knopf: 1936.
Shabad, P. (2001). Despair and the Return of Hope: Echoes of Mourning in
Psychotherapy. Northvale, N.J: Jason Aronson.
Shabad, P. (2010). The suffering of passion. Metamorphoses and the embrace of the
stranger. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 710-729.
Shabad, P. (2020). The forward edge of resistance: Toward the dignity of human agency.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 30 (1): 51-63.
Shabad, P. (2022) Owing and Being Owed: Shame and Responsibility Toward The
Other, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 32:4, 389-404.
Tolstoy, L. (1886). The death of Ivan Ilych. New York: Signet. 1960.
Winnicott, D.W. (1949). Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma. In Through
Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books. 1975.