This clinical description of a young man hospitalized for a melancholic disturbance shows the importance of taking into account his contingent experience of shame. This affect of shame allows him to subjectively expropriate his experience of melancholia and accompanies his process of working it through. The assumption considered here postulates that in clinical work, the expression of shame as a way of calling to the Other constitutes an attempt for the question to be proven as such. The authors question the experience of shame in melancholia and, more generally, the evolution of the conceptions of affects and a certain current of thought in psychoanalysis today.
Narcissism; melancholia; invocating impulse; feelings of shame