Anatomia wstydu, czyli "Opowiadanie o niewidzialnym dziecku"

Abstract

Tove Jansson, in a story entitled Opowiadanie o niewidzialnym dziecku, easily and cunningly presents, among other things, the research on shame — the reason, result and preventive measures against sad (or even tragic) consequences of embarrassing a small girl. In this story, as in other texts in the series of Moomins, human things are hidden behind fantasy (creatures and the world presented) and the symbol (disappearance), paradoxically, though, thanks to it, they acquire the status of a model existing over particular realizations in the real human world. The story of the Finnish author metaphorically shows the effects of an insistent experience of shame, that is, civil death, understood as the loss of identity or elimination via total disregard. The author’s intuition is proved by James Gilligan’s, Helen Merrell Lynd’s and Bruno Bettelheim’s works, as well as by many other researchers.