Thomas J.Scheff "Looking Glass Self: Goffman as Symbolic Interactionist (Chapter 3 Goffman Unbound)

From Thomas J. Scheff, Goffman Unbound: A New Paradigm for Social Science (2006). Paradigm Publishers.

Chapter 3 Looking Glass Self: 

Goffman as a Symbolic Interactionist

Goffman’s most basic work can be seen as closely related to “the look-

ing-glass self” (LGS). This idea is of great interest because it connects two

vast realms, the social nature of the self, on the one hand, and the intense

emotional life that results, on the other. Charles Cooley, who invented the

phrase, proposed first that the self is social, that we “live in the minds of

others without knowing it.” He went on to say that living in the minds of

others, imaginatively, gives rise to real and intensely powerful emotions,

pride and shame (Cooley 1922).

The importance of Cooley’s idea is not immediately apparent in

Goffman’s writing. As already indicated, although seemingly clear on the

surface, there are many twists and turns. Read with care, the structure

of his most popular work, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, reveals

what seems to be two different authors. The first half of the book deals

with performances and dramaturgical staging, rituals of theatre (Goff-

man the Structuralist). Behavior is scripted by the social situation, mo-

tives are not important. The first act lulls the sociological reader into the

Durkheimian fantasy.

However, beginning with Chapter 4 on discrepant roles, the thesis

begins to drift toward the motives of the actors. By the sixth and most

substantial chapter on “impression management,” the other Goffman

has virtually disappeared. This chapter instead concerns actors’ motives,

their harried attempts to stave off, or at least manage, embarrassment and

related emotions. Without a word of warning, Goffman the Sociological

Social Psychologist has reared his head, shape-shifting. The reader has

been conned.

The idea of impression management underlies many of the examples

that enliven Goffman’s work, and makes it understandable and entertain-

ing. One manages one’s image in the eyes of others in order to come to

terms with the basic social emotions, pride and shame. This idea is stated

in Cooley’s (1922) evocation of the looking-glass self:

A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagi-

nation of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his [sic]

judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride

or mortification. (184)

Compared to Goffman, Cooley was relatively direct in naming pride and

shame (considering mortification to be a shame variant). For him these two

emotions both arose from self-monitoring, the process that was at the cen-

ter of his social psychology. To be sure, in his discussion of what he called

the “self-sentiments,” pride and shame are mentioned only as two of other

possible emotions.

But in his definition of the looking-glass self, he referred exclusively

to pride and shame. And to make sure we understand this point, he men-

tions shame three more times in the passage that follows (184–85, emphasis

added):

The comparison with a looking-glass hardly suggests the second element,

the imagined judgment, which is quite essential. The thing that moves

us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves,

but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon

another’s mind. This is evident from the fact that the character and weight

of that other, in whose mind we see ourselves, makes all the difference

with our feeling. We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a

straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in

the eyes of a refined one and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining

share, the judgments of the other mind. A man will boast to one person

of an action—say some sharp transaction in trade—which he would be

ashamed to own to another.

Although Cooley is explicit in suggesting that pride and shame are social

emotions, he makes no attempt to define either emotion. Instead he uses

the vernacular words as if they are self-explanatory.

But the meanings of vernacular words for emotions are usually quite

ambiguous. For example, in current usage in English, the word pride used

without qualification usually has an inflection of arrogance or hubris

(“Pride goeth before a fall”). In order to refer to the kind of pride implied

in Cooley’s analysis, the opposite of shame, one must add a qualifier like

justified or genuine. And usage of the word shame, especially in English,

is even more confusing, as will be indicated below. Using undefined emo-

tion words is an invitation to the Tower of Babel.

However ambiguous, Cooley’s analysis of self-monitoring clearly sug-

gests that pride and shame are the basic social emotions. Goffman was the

first social scientist to follow up on Cooley’s idea, fleshing it out with a large

number of refreshingly varied examples of everyday behavior.

Goffman’s Version of the Looking Glass

In Goffman’s basic work, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the

looking-glass self is not mentioned explicitly. There are three references

to Cooley, but none concern the looking glass. Yet Cooley’s idea can be

seen to form the basic structure of all of Goffman’s earlier writings, es-

pecially Presentation of Self, some of the chapters of Interaction Ritual,

and several other books that were published before Frame Analysis

(1974). The latter book is entirely cognitive, and so marks a departure

from Goffman’s concern with emotions.

Like Cooley, Goffman’s elaboration on the theme of the looking glass

is ambiguous but in an entirely different way. Cooley’s prose is simple and

unassuming, only slightly removed from ordinary language. But Goffman’s,

besides being dazzlingly brilliant, is also incredibly involuted and complex.

It is dense with meaning, innuendo, impromptu classifications, qualifica-

tions, and expansion. It is also humorous, ironic, and witty in ways that

both entertain and irritate, reveal and conceal.

Emotions and shared awareness are basic components in much of

Goffman’s thought for most of his career. Unlike most social scientists,

Goffman explored emotions as well as thoughts and actions. However,

there is an immediate sticking point: most of Goffman’s treatment of feel-

ing concerns embarrassment, and less prominently, its two cousins, shame

and humiliation. These emotions play an important part in many of his

early studies, both explicitly, and in larger scope, by implication. Why only

these three emotions? What about other primary emotions, such as love,

fear, anger, grief, and so on?

To the average reader, the exclusive focus on shame/embarrassment

seems arbitrary. An exception is the great English comic writer Allan Bennett,

who appears to take Goffman’s emphasis in stride. He sums it up: “We must

love one another or die—of embarrassment” (2001, 353). This short sentence

packs a lot of information: what Goffman has left out (love) and what he has

included (embarrassment). It also wittily alludes to a 1960s song by Crosby,

Stills, Nash, and Young: “We Must Love One Another or Die.” But Schudson’s 

reaction (1984) is more typical. He devoted an entire article to questioning

what he sees as Goffman’s exclusive concern with embarrassment.

As indicated in the last chapter, Goffman offered only a single and

somewhat unclear justification. He argued that embarrassment had univer-

sal, pancultural importance in social interaction, but he didn’t bother to

explain why. His examples, however, suggest that every actor is extraordi-

narily sensitive to the amount of deference being received by others. No

matter how slight the difference between what is expected and what is

received, embarrassment and other painful emotions may result. We are

social creatures to the core.

Durkheim, the French sociologist who was the founder of modern

sociology, provided only hints along these lines. His theory depended on

the idea of a social emotion that held societies together, but the word he

used for it, respect, is not an emotion. He also pointed to what he called

“collective consciousness” as a necessary prerequisite for a society, but

went no further than describing it abstractly. Before reviewing Goffman’s

treatment of shared awareness, it is first necessary to further explore his

treatment of emotions.

The Emotion Lexicon in Presentation of Self

This section explores the density of emotion words in Presentation of

Self in Everyday Life (PSEL). As noted above, several readers of PSEL con-

cluded that Goffman dealt extensively with embarrassment, but only this

emotion. Some, like Bennett and Heath, didn’t mind, but most others, like

Schudson, did. In this section I want to further clarify the extent and nature

of Goffman’s treatment of embarrassment and related emotions, since his

usage in this respect is central to my thesis. For this purpose, I will focus,

for the most part, on PSEL since I consider it to be his most fundamental

statement, at least for the major part of his career.

First, as already indicated, in this book he not only dealt extensively

with embarrassment, but also with its two relatives, shame and humili-

ation. To get an idea of the attention he gave to these and other emo-

tions, I made a count of the various emotion words it contains. With 36

occurrences, embarrassment is far and away the most frequent. But the

word shame and its derivatives, such as shamed and ashamed, are also

frequent, with 22 occurrences. The other member of this family, humili-

ation, occurs 5 times.

Even the least frequent of these three words, humiliation, occurs

more frequently in the text than any other emotion word. Fear, with 4

occurrences, is next, followed by love, with three. The words naming the

other major emotions such as pride (3), anger/rage (2), and grief (1) are

still less frequent.lookiNg-glASS Self

Indirect References to Shame/Embarrassment

Although the word count of the shame triad in PSEL is helpful, it fails to

capture the extent of Goffman’s treatment of embarrassment and its close

relatives. First, Goffman used many words that convey shame or embar-

rassment without naming them explicitly. Many of his quotes are of this

nature. For example, “his pride is deeply wounded” (50) conveys shame

indirectly.1 Another instance occurs in his discussion of the difficulty faced

by the person in the role of the go-between:

When a go-between operates in the actual presence of the two teams

of which he is a member, we obtain a wonderful display, not unlike a

man desperately trying to play tennis with himself . . . As an individual,

the go-between’s activity is bizarre, untenable, and undignified, vacil-

lating as it does from one set of appearances and loyalties to another.

(149, emphasis added)

The idea that the activity of a go-between caught between conflicting

audiences is “bizarre, untenable, and undignified” is an indirect referral to

embarrassment, especially the use of the word undignified. The idea of

dignity and its lack, almost always a cognate or pride and shame, occurs

very frequently in PSEL. Goffman’s references to dignity or its derivatives

(17 times) always imply pride or, much more frequently, shame.

Another obvious instance occurs in a by now well-known quote from

Simmel that Goffman has included:

An ideal sphere lies around every human being. Although differing in

size in various directions and differing according to the person with

whom one entertains relations, this sphere cannot be penetrated, unless

the personality value of the individual is thereby destroyed. A sphere of

this sort is placed around man by his “honor.” Language very poignantly

designates an insult to one’s honor as “coming too close”: the radius of

this sphere marks, as it were, the distance whose trespassing by another

person insults one’s honor. (69)

The idea of honor, especially insulting it or having it destroyed, might as

well be expressed in pride and shame language.

Many passages indicate embarrassment or shame without using

either word explicitly. Here is a virtuoso instance that involves two direct

and two indirect referrals:

Knowing that his audiences are capable of forming bad impressions of

him, the individual may come to feel ashamed [1] of a well-intentioned

honest act merely because the context of its performance provides false 

impressions that are bad. Feeling this unwarranted shame [2], he may

feel that his feelings can be seen; feeling that he is thus seen, he may

feel that his appearance confirms these false conclusions concern-

ing him [3]. He may then add to the precariousness of his position

by engaging in just those defensive maneuvers that he would employ

were he really guilty. In this way it is possible for all of us to become

fleetingly for ourselves the worst person we can imagine that others

might imagine us to be [4]. (236, emphasis added)

Following the logic of the looking-glass self, the clause “he may feel that

his appearance confirms these false conclusions concerning him” implies

at least the possibility of shame or embarrassment. The final sentence in

this passage goes much further: “In this way it is possible for all of us to

become fleetingly for ourselves the worst person we can imagine that

others might imagine us to be.”

This last haunting line implies a shame state, brief though it may

be, that is extremely intense. More than any other passage by Goffman,

perhaps, this one takes us on a jolting roller-coaster ride through all three

steps of the looking-glass self: the imagination of the other’s view of self,

the imagined judgment of the other of self, and, with powerful impact, the

actual, not imagined, feeling about self that is the result. For Goffman’s ac-

tors, social interaction, if not a vale of embarrassment, is a slippery slope

because of the constant anticipation of the possibility of embarrassment

or even more painful variants.

In addition to finding many instances in which embarrassment or

shame are implied but not stated directly, another unexpected result of

my count of emotion words in PSEL is the large number of direct refer-

ences to shame and humiliation. Together the count of these two words

(27) is almost as great as that for the word embarrassment (36). The ratio

between these three words brings up a new issue.

The Taboo on Shame in Modern Societies

The response of readers like Schudson, Heath, and Bennett has led us

to expect that Goffman’s focus was overwhelmingly only on a single

emotion, embarrassment. Indeed, Goffman himself contributed to this

expectation, since his one essay on emotion concerned embarrassment

(1956). In this article, and in the later reprinting of it in 1967, Goffman

provides no link to shame or humiliation. Indeed, he makes no refer-

ence to either emotion. The word ashamed occurs once, in a quote

from another author. Furthermore, his study of stigma (1963b), whose

central topic might be seen as shame, uses that word only twice, and

only in passing.lookiNg-glASS Self

How are we to understand the single-minded focus on embarrassment

by Goffman in all but one of his works, and by readers even of that work?

Attempting to answer this question requires reference to cultural influences

on emotion discourse in Western society. As indicated in the Preface, I pro-

pose that there is a taboo on shame in modern industrial societies (Scheff

2003a). One indication is that studies of shame by Cooley, Freud, Elias, Lynd,

Lewis, and Tomkins, like Goffman’s, have been largely ignored. The taboo

on shame in English still holds: current usage, for the most part, assigns a

singular meaning that is intense and narrow. This meaning offends, on the

one hand, and, on the other, misses the everyday function of shame.

The aspect of the taboo that is most relevant to the argument here

is that unlike traditional societies, Western culture makes a firm distinction

between shame, humiliation, and with great force, embarrassment. When I

ask students if shame and embarrassment are close relatives or distinct emo-

tions, there is virtual unanimity of opinion: distinct emotions. If I perchance

suggest that embarrassment might be a mild version of shame, their eyes

glaze over.

Usage in traditional societies makes no such distinction. In Spanish,

for example, the word verguenza means both shame and embarrassment.

Languages of traditional societies, such as Arabic, are the same. In Western

culture, embarrassment, usually a less intense form of shame, is less taboo. Em-

barrassment is speakable, shame is unspeakable, in ordinary conversation.

In the twentieth century, an increasing taboo on the shame word

has been especially clear in English (Scheff 2003a). There has also been,

as noted above, an ambiguity in using the word for pride: is it a positive or

a negative emotion? Surprisingly, a change in this respect seems to be tak-

ing place in the German language. Since the end of World War II, German

speakers have been moving away from the tradition in European languages

of having words for a positive shame (scham) and a negative, disgrace

shame (schande). Schande is now seen as old-fashioned, and is seldom

used. Like English, German now has a single word for shame (scham),

and this word seems to be taking on at least some of the negative valence

formerly reserved for schande.

Similarly, in German, the negative kind of pride (hochmut) is now

also seen as old fashioned, and seldom used. The formerly positive word for

pride (stoltz) is now taking on some of the negative valence of hochmut.

In this sense, the pride/shame lexicon in German is being Anglicized.

As far as I can tell, however, the other European languages are not

following suit. In French, for example, there continues to be a highly nega-

tive shame (honte) and an everyday shame (pudeur). Similarly, in French,

there continues to be a highly negative form of pride (orgueil), and a less

negative form (fierté).2 It might be said that the pride/shame lexicon in

English and German is becoming more taboo, but in the other European

languages, such as French, Spanish, and Italian, it is not.

The idea of a taboo in Anglophone culture might explain why the

readers of PSEL in English responded as if it dealt only with embarrassment,

and also why Goffman himself emphasized embarrassment rather than

shame and humiliation in his later work. My hypothesis is that like other

scholars of shame, noticing that readers ignored it, he came to ignore it

himself. With one exception, the other shame scholars mentioned above

followed the same trajectory, especially Freud, Elias, Lynd, and Tomkins.

The exception was the psychologist/psychoanalyst Helen Lewis. Her

principal empirical study, an analysis of shame and guilt in psychotherapy

transcripts (1971), was published early in her career, and she continued shame

studies for the rest of her life. She told me (correspondence, 1991), however,

she had noted that although many people praised her book, no one seemed

to have read it. If my argument is correct, she might have had many more

readers if she had used the phrase “Embarrassment and Guilt” rather than

“Shame and Guilt” in the title. In any case, like Lewis and the other scholars

of shame named above, Goffman appeared to consider shame and its close

relatives like embarrassment the master emotion of everyday life.

Mindreading (Intersubjectivity/Attunement)

The Cooley/Goffman emphasis on the shame triad is a great deviation

from the very foundations of Western thought. Western culture has at

its center the embedded idea of the isolated, self-contained individual.

Since the shame triad implies that our self-feelings are dependent on

other people, it violates the principle of Western culture. For this reason,

discussions of shame and its relatives are usually avoided, both in lay and

social science discourse.

The second component of the Cooley conjecture, shared awareness,

also involves violation of the canon of individualism. Intersubjectivity, living

in the minds of others, implies that individuals, as well as being separate

units, may be joined together as components of larger units, such as pairs,

threesomes, and still larger groups. Although the idea of shared conscious-

ness is a staple in Eastern cultures, it is unacceptable in Western thought.

The Cooley/Goffman conjecture, linking a taboo emotion, shame, and a

taboo idea of unity, is infinitely unacceptable in the West.

The focus on embarrassment/shame as a response to the views that

others have of the self forces us to entertain the second component of the

Cooley/Goffman analysis, intersubjectivity. They suggest that we spend

much of our life living in the minds of others. In this respect, the conjec-

ture follows in the footsteps of Mead (1934) and Blumer (1986). What might

be called “mutual mindreading” was central to their perspectives.

Mead’s description of taking the role of the other initially gives the

impression that he is referring to role behavior. Indeed, he sometimes uses

the phrase in that way: in order to coordinate one’s actions with another,

say in dancing a tango, one needs to learn not only one’s own role, but also

the role enactment of one’s partner.

But in reading further, it becomes clear that Mead is referring not only

to behavior, but also, more frequently, to the perspective and thoughts of

others as well. The concept of “taking the role of the generalized other”

clearly means that one takes on the perspective of an imagined person or

group of persons, even a fictitious group. Similarly, his definition of a social

institution involves each participant knowing not only her own perspec-

tive, attitudes, and actions, but also those of the other participants. Mead’s

theory of role-taking clearly involves the concept of intersubjectivity, the

sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals.

Is Intersubjectivity Invisible?

Cooley’s idea of social life was also built around intersubjectivity. But he

carried the implications of the idea an important step further than Mead,

Dewey, or any of their followers. Cooley argued that intersubjectivity is

taken completely for granted to the point of invisibility:

As is the case with other feelings, we do not think much of it [that is, of

social self-feeling] so long as it is moderately and regularly gratified. Many

people of balanced mind and congenial activity scarcely know that they

care what others think of them, and will deny, perhaps with indignation,

that such care is an important factor in what they are and do. But this is

illusion. If failure or disgrace arrives, if one suddenly finds that the faces

of men [sic] show coldness or contempt instead of the kindliness and

deference that he is used to, he will perceive from the shock, the fear,

the sense of being outcast and helpless, that he was living in the minds

of others without knowing it, just as we daily walk the solid ground

without thinking how it bears us up. (Cooley 1922, 208)

The idea that we are “living in the minds of others without knowing it”

is profoundly significant. Intersubjectivity is built into human nature, yet

Western culture makes it invisible. As small children we learn to go back

and forth between our own point of view and that of the other(s). By the

age of five or six, children have become so adept that they forget they are

doing it. Using a variation of Cooley’s words, it’s like “the ground that bears

us up when we walk,” it is taken for granted. The intersubjective bond to

others becomes invisible, at least in Western societies.

Although human communication is built upon intersubjective accord,

it is learned so early it goes unmarked in most discourse. Occasionally it will

be referred to, but only casually and in passing. For example, one might say 

to a friend, “We both know that. . . .” The idea occurs much more elaborately

in the popular song (from the 1930s?) whose lyrics were something like:

I know that you know that I know that you know . . . [that we’re in love?]

(Note: I recall this song from my childhood, but so far have been unable

to locate it.)

The reference in the song to the cascading levels of reciprocating min-

dreading is mostly comical. Goffman’s Strategic Interaction (1969) took

this issue seriously. When persons accurately assess each other at all the

levels of cascade, they arrive at a sharing of experience so deep that one

can well say that they become as one, if only momentarily.

But as Cooley noted, we usually ignore this fact. An example of

scholars taking mindreading in humans for granted occurs in a treatise by

O’Connell (1998). The author reviews a large body of experiments that show

that small children, animals such as primates, and autistic persons are very

poor at reading the minds of others. But neither O’Connell nor any of the

studies she reviews acknowledge one implication of the findings: children,

primates, and the autistic are poor at mindreading, but normal human

adults are good at it. No studies are reported which test the accuracy of

normal adult intersubjectivity. Even studies of mindreading seem to take

for granted Cooley’s idea that human adults spend much of their life living

in the minds of others.

A flagrant instance involves one of the central doctrines in post-

modern theory, Derrida’s proposition that the meaning of all texts is

fundamentally undecideable. At the most atomic level, this proposition is

true, since all commonly used words, in all languages, have more than one

meaning. Multiple meanings lead to inescapable ambiguity in the meaning

of individual words, whether spoken or written.

But the leap to the idea of universal undecideability is erroneous. The

meaning of individual words is undecideable only if the context is shorn

away. Consensual meanings are arrived at by referring to the context in

which words occur, both the local context and the extended context. To

be sure, interpretation in context is a complex process, fraught with the

risk of error. For this reason, there is considerable misunderstanding in

communication, even when messages or texts are skillfully constructed.

But, by the same token, there is also considerable consensual under-

standing about the meaning of messages and texts, even complex ones.

Otherwise the social order would immediately collapse. The idea of unde-

cideability seems to be based on a mechanical model of the communication

of meaning, as if it were determined by rote responses to individual words. In

particular, undecideabilty ignores the possibility that communication involves

at its very core the process of taking the role of the other, of understanding

the meaning of messages or texts not only from the receiver’s point of view,

but also from the sender’s (compare Donald Davidson, “The Very Idea of

Conceptual Schemas,” in Davidson 2001).

Another example is what is called the Problem of Other Minds in the

discipline of philosophy. Like much of postmodern theory, it is built entirely

upon abstract reasoning rather than on systematic observation. Given this

approach, it is not surprising that the contributors to this field have decided

that no one can ever really know the mind of another person. This belief

reflects the Western insistence on individualism, that each of us is essentially

alone. But it seems bizarre in Eastern cultures, with their insistence on the

group over the individual. In these settings, each mind is thought to be a

fragment of one supermind, the Great Cloud of Unknowing. The concept of

intersubjectivity offers a middle ground, in that one can evaluate the accuracy

of mindreading without automatically assuming or rejecting the idea.

Beginning in the 1980s, there has been an expanding literature on

what is called “mutual knowledge” in philosophy and economics (Clark and

Marshall 1981; Sperber and Wilson 1986). These ventures do not mention the

earlier explorations of the looking glass, consensus, or Goffman. They also

have a quirk: the possibility of cascades of mutual mindreading, “I know that

you know that I know . . . ,” seems to cause panic reactions in the authors.

As Goffman and others have hinted however, the number of levels of mutual

awareness is surely an empirical problem, not a conceptual one.

A final and arguable example is the work of Cooley, Mead, and

Blumer themselves. Although role-taking is central to their visions of hu-

man nature, they deal with the concept only in the abstract. Goffman’s

treatment of concrete episodes of intersubjectivity (and its correlate, the

pervasiveness of embarrassment or anticipations of embarrassment) begins

to fill in the interstellar void between the abstraction and its omnipresent

everyday meaning in human conduct.

Goffman’s treatment fleshes out the idea of role-taking itself, and just

as importantly, its close kinship to emotion, in a way that Mead, Blumer,

and even Cooley never did. To be sure, Cooley clearly states the linkage

to embarrassment/shame in his discussion of the looking-glass self, but he

doesn’t give enough varied examples that would allow one to see implica-

tions. Cooley’s few examples also tend to the melodramatic. Goffman uses

many, many everyday examples that bring the ideas to life in living color.

In this sense, the earlier writers found a vast, unknown continent, the

emotional/relational world, without leaving their ships. Goffman, along

with the more cunning novelists, explored the interior.

Emotion Management

Goffman went beyond Cooley in another way also. Cooley stopped at

three steps of the looking-glass self, with the experience of pride or shame.

But Goffman’s exploration of impression management implies a fourth

step, the management of emotion.3 Although Goffman had nothing to say

about the pride option, his examples suggest that actors usually do not

accept shame/embarrassment passively. Instead they try to manage it, by

avoidance, if possible. Most of the embarrassment/shame possibilities that

Goffman’s examples explore are not about the actual occurrence of emo-

tions, but anticipations, and management based on these anticipations. (In

European languages other than English, the anticipation of shame/embar-

rassment is taken to be a shame variant, such as pudeur [modesty]. This

same idea is expressible in English as “a sense of shame.”)

Goffman’s examples further imply that if shame/embarrassment

cannot be avoided, then his actors actively deny it, attempting to save

face, on the one hand, and/or to avoid pain, on the other. The idea of

shame management connects Goffman’s work with that of Lynd (1958)

and Lewis (1971). Lewis (1971), specifically, showed that in sessions of

psychotherapy, shame/embarrassment occurs with greater frequency

than any other emotion, but is almost never acknowledged, either by

therapist or patient. Like shared awareness, it is largely invisible, at least

in modern Western societies.

Goffman’s drift into instances of emotion avoidance provides yet

another example of contradiction between what he said and what he

did. Ideologically, Goffman was dismissive of psychoanalytic and psycho-

dynamic formulations. But his portrayals of emotion management cross

over, however inadvertently, into the psychodynamic realm of Freud and

of Lewis. These cases strongly support their psychodynamic formulations,

and importantly, also broaden them.

Almost all of Freud’s and Lewis’s cases were patients in psychotherapy,

leaving the reader free to infer that avoidance/denial of emotion occurs for

the most part only in neurosis. Like Lynd (1958), however, Goffman’s every-

day instances suggest that they occur not only in psychotherapy, but are a

basic part of the human condition.

However, Goffman’s actual language implies an important difference

between his use of the looking-glass model and Cooley’s conception. In

his straightforward and unassuming way, Cooley strongly implied that the

looking-glass process was outside of awareness (“we live in the minds of

others without knowing it”). As far as I have been able to tell, Goffman

doesn’t consider this issue: to what extent are his actors aware of their

more or less constant impression management?

I have been unable to find any explicit consideration of this issue,

but Goffman’s language seems to imply awareness:

When an individual’s projected self is threatened during interaction,

he may with poise suppress all signs of shame and embarrassment. No

flusterings, or efforts to conceal having seen them, obtrude upon the

smooth flow of the encounter; participants can proceed as if no incident

has occurred. (Goffman 1967, 110)

This passage seems to imply awareness, as do many others. Here is another

example:

. . . preventive practices are constantly employed to avoid . . . embarrass-

ments and . . . corrective practices are constantly employed to compensate

for discrediting occurrences that have not been successfully avoided.

(Goffman 1959, 13)

Although the matter is by no means clear, these passages and other similar

ones seem to suggest that Goffman’s version of the looking-glass process

was mostly conscious. One consequence is that it gives many readers the

impression that his actors are cynical and self-centered. If we take the Cooley

line that they are often not aware of the looking-glass process, they might

somehow seem less repulsive. It’s a tradeoff, because at the same time they

are also less aware. This latter interpretation seems to me much more prefer-

able, because it is less morally rejecting about the nature of human nature.

There are other aspects of the looking-glass process that both Cooley

and Goffman omitted entirely in their consideration of the second step,

imagining the other’s view of self. First, there is the degree of accuracy

in our image of how the other sees us. The extent to which they actually

see us the way we imagine makes a great deal of difference in real life.

Neither Cooley nor Goffman, nor Mead or Dewey for that matter, discusses

this issue. Mead, especially, since he is concerned with cooperation and

rational reflection, seems to take accuracy for granted.

There is also another part of the second step which is somewhat

more subtle than accuracy. It involves the weight the actor gives to the

point of view of the other, relative to one’s own point of view. Does one

assign more value to one’s own point of view, to the other’s, or balance

the two as equally valuable? This issue arises again in Chapter 7 in defining

genuine love, and by implication, true solidarity.

To understand another person in any way, the comparison of the other

person’s view of you needs to be weighed against your own view. This is not

a static matter, but seems to involve moving back and forth between one’s

own view and that of the other. Even something as simple as understand-

ing the meaning of the other’s words and their importance involves this

back and forth process, which has been called pendulation (Levine 1997).

In social interaction, we move swiftly and unself-consciously between the

viewpoints of self and other, as a pendulum swings, back and forth. By the

time we are adults we have been doing it so long and so well that we are

completely unaware that it is happening. The process of pendulation is the

real meaning of Cooley’s idea that we live in the minds of others without 

knowing it; we are in and out. This dynamic is the key for understanding

many important issues about human relationships.

Pendulation starts out, in early childhood, as movement between self

and other’s viewpoint. But after we have mastered that process, we are able

to perform a parallel internally, back and forth between self and an imagined

external other. This dynamic lies at the heart of what is called distancing

of emotion: feeling an emotion, then seeing oneself externally feeling it. As

proposed in my earlier book (1979), true catharsis occurs only at optimal

distance, that is, balancing between being in and out of the emotion.

As will be discussed in Chapter 12, distancing of this kind is also a

key issue in creative writing. The best of the creative writers, like Goff-

man, often have insufficient distance from their own work. They can’t see

it objectively because most of their effort is involved in creating it in the

first place. Most writers have the opposite problem, continually worrying

about the viewpoint of the other, what others will think of their writing.

All writers face the problem of finding the right distance.

In the larger scheme of things, Goffman’s forceful treatment of the

major role that intersubjectivity and embarrassment continually play in

social interaction gives credence to Cooley’s version of the looking-glass

self. Goffman was very clear on this point:

. . . embarrassment is not an irrational impulse breaking through socially

prescribed behavior but part of this orderly behavior itself. (1967, 111)

Even Simmel, who was aware of intersubjectivity and of shame, didn’t link

them, and gave few concrete examples. Goffman stands alone. In my opinion,

it was he, and not any of his antecedents, who discovered the emotional/re-

lational world. We all swim in this world all day, every day, but Goffman was

the first to notice and describe it. For this service alone, I believe that we

should award supreme honor to his memory.

Goffman and Positive Science

Unlike most analysts of interior life, Goffman was not content to leave his basic

concepts undefined. Although he casually uses metaphors like everyone else

(the term “mystic union” several times to refer to speakers who are talking to

each other), he also offers a fairly elaborate and complex definition of “being

in a state of talk.” Since his definition requires an entire page of text, I will

not repeat it all here. Suffice it to know that it contains phrases that imply

mutual mindreading: “An understanding will prevail [among the speakers] as

to how long and how frequently each speaker is to hold the floor . . .” (1967,

35; a similar formulation occurs earlier, on p. 34). The definition comes clos-

est to explicitly describing intersubjective accord in this line:

A single focus of thought and attention, and a single flow of talk, tends

to be maintained and to be legitimated as officially representative of the

encounter. (Goffman 1967, 34, emphasis added)

The significance of the phrase “a single focus of thought and attention”

becomes more apparent if it is compared to a similar phrase, “joint atten-

tion,” used by the psychologist Bruner (1983) when he is explaining how

an infant learns to become attuned4 to its caretaker. The mother, he says,

is only trying to teach a new word. She places an object (such as a doll)

in her own and the baby’s line of gaze, and shakes it to make sure of the

baby’s attention, saying, “See the pretty dolly.” In this situation, the baby is

likely to learn not only the meaning of a word, but also, since both parties

are looking at the same object, how to have, jointly with the mother, “a

single focus of thought and attention” to use Goffman’s phrase.

A conceptual definition of intersubjectivity is as far as Goffman goes

in attempting to explicate this idea; he doesn’t provide objective indicators.

Perhaps Goffman was uncomfortable about the implications of flatly stating

and following up an idea that is anathema in individualistic modern societies,

that we are all “members one of another.” Although church members recite

this idea every Sunday, most would be loath to take its meaning literally, as

Cooley and Goffman did.

But with the other interior strand of Goffman’s work, embarrassment,

he was not content to give only a conceptual definition, but also followed

up, offering elements of an operational definition:

An individual may recognize extreme embarrassment in others and even

in himself by the objective signs of emotional disturbance: blushing,

fumbling, stuttering, an unusually low- or high-pitched voice, quavering

speech or breaking of the voice, sweating, blanching, blinking, tremor

of the hand, hesitating or vacillating movement, absentmindedness, and

malapropisms. As Mark Baldwin remarked about shyness, there may be

“a lowering of the eyes, bowing of the head, putting of hands behind

the back, nervous fingering of the clothing or twisting of the fingers

together, and stammering, with some incoherence of idea as expressed

in speech.” There are also symptoms of a subjective kind: constriction

of the diaphragm, a feeling of wobbliness, consciousness of strained

and unnatural gestures, a dazed sensation, dryness of the mouth, and

tenseness of the muscles. In cases of mild discomfiture, these visible

and invisible flusterings occur but in less perceptible form. (Goffman

1967, 97, emphasis added)

This definition links an interior emotion with surface observables. With his

usual uncanny instinct, in the last sentence he even seems to hint at the

need for further elaboration of the operational definition: “these visible and 

invisible flusterings [that accompany embarrassment] occur but in less

perceptible form.” This clause seems to point toward the development of

more elaborate coding systems for the verbal and gestural indicators of

shame and embarrassment, such as the one by Retzinger (1991; 1995).

Goffman’s attempt at defining embarrassment is even more extraor-

dinary in the context of contemporary social science. The few social

science theorists who emphasize emotions seldom define them, even

conceptually.5 An example would be Elias’s masterwork, The Civilizing

Process (1939). His proposition that the threshold for shame is advanced

in the civilizing process is the central thread of the entire work. In a later

work of Elias’s, The Germans (1996), shame is again frequently evoked,

though not explicitly as in the earlier study.

Yet Elias offered no definition of shame in either book, seeming to

assume that the reader would understand the concept of shame in the same

way that he did. The absence of any definition of shame and a systematic

way of identifying it is particularly glaring in The Civilizing Process.

This study entails an extensive analysis of shame in many excerpts from

advice and etiquette manuals in five languages over six centuries. The

analysis of the excerpts is completely intuitive, and in most cases, highly

inferential. That is, the word shame is sometimes used in the excerpts

that he selected, but much more frequently it is not.

Elias relied on intuitive and unexplicated interpretations of what

Retzinger would call cue words, phrases, and sentences, in context.

Even if his interpretations were fairly accurate, which they might be, he

still gave little direction to future research on the subject. Unlike Elias

and most other analysts of emotion, Goffman took at least the initial step

toward overcoming this problem. By explicitly defining his concepts, he

attempted to link interior variables with observable indicators. Perhaps

the secret for success in social science is not only to study both surface

and interior, but to also provide links that connect them.

Conclusion

This chapter has inferred two basic propositions about self and society

from an analysis of the work of Cooley and Goffman. These propositions

link two concepts: intersubjective attunement on the one hand, and shame

and its close relatives on the other. (1) To the extent that two parties are

intersubjectively attuned, both parties will be in a state of authentic pride.

(2) To the extent that they are not attuned, one or both will be in a state of

embarrassment, shame, or humiliation. Like Cooley, Goffman’s approach

implied that mutual awareness, along with pride and shame, is the glue

that holds not only relationships, but whole societies, together.

In this respect, Goffman turns out to be not a follower of Durkheim,

the founder of modern sociology, but a step beyond him. Durkheim alluded

to both mutual awareness and the social emotion, but only abstractly and

in separate compartments of his work. By bringing the two realms together,

and profusely illustrating their linkage in concrete examples, Goffman took

a giant step forward with ideas that in Durkheim, and even in Cooley, were

quite abstract and unclear.

The Cooley/Goffman approach could open up a whole approach built

around the dynamics of the looking-glass self, and Goffman’s extension of it

into a fourth step, the management of the resulting emotions. Exploration

of this type could mean a new understanding of human relationships.

Notes

1. Retzinger (1991; 1995) has provided a lengthy list of these words.

2. I am indebted to Simon Gottschalk for calling my attention to the positive and

negative pride words in French.

3. Arlie Hochschild, who was Goffman’s student, has made emotion management

a central topic in her work.

4. Attunement is Stern’s (1977) term for intersubjective accord.

5. However, in her extensive treatment of shame, Lynd (1958) also took a step

toward explicit definition. In a rare miss, Goffman did not reference Lynd’s work