Shame and losing face in Taiwanese culture: a clinical and cultural perspective

In the 1950s, G. Piers provides an influential psychoanalytic account of guilt and shame anchored in the metapsychological language of ego, superego, and ego-ideal in Shame and Guilt: a Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study, a book co-written by him and an anthropologist. He starts from the better-understood concept, guilt, which is generated by the psychic agency of superego and may remain unconscious while the concomitant anxiety could enter consciousness. Generally speaking, shame had been assimilated to or hidden behind guilt in the history of psychoanalysis. In addition to Japanese culture, Chinese culture is often cited as another typical example of shame cultures. Though most scholars agree that shame is an essential component in Chinese moral landscape, some also suggest that the Chinese notion of "chi" could not be simply equated to the Western imagination of shame. In the 1940s, a Chinese anthropologist indicates that the confusion comes from the existence of two different notions of face, "mien zi" and "lien".