Nicole Chew-Helbig: The Shame Paradox, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

In an age of artificial intelligence, one question keeps returning. Will we be replaced?

The Shame Paradox answers from an unexpected place. Not what machines can do, but what they cannot feel. Shame is the emotion we spend our lives fleeing, the one we have been told is toxic, the one an entire industry has been built to eliminate. Nicole Chew-Helbig argues that shame is also what makes us human, and the one frontier no machine can cross.

If shame protects social bonds, why does it so often destroy them? If it corrects behaviour, why do those who carry the most of it become the least capable of change? And if it evolved to preserve our humanity, why do we so readily use it to destroy one another's?

Three lives run through the book whose stories carry the argument from shame's origins in infant neurobiology to its weaponisation in intimate relationships and public life.

Grounded in neuroscience, field theory, and a rereading of Genesis, the book arrives at a conclusion both ancient and urgent. Shame is not pathology as commonly believed, but consciousness itself, the felt knowledge of good and evil, the capacity to be wounded by encounter, and the last thing that makes us irreplaceably human.

Nicole Chew-Helbig is a psychotherapist and researcher in Singapore, where she practises as a Gestalt therapist. She holds a doctorate in psychotherapy science from Vienna. Her doctoral research developed therapeutic autoethnography, the study of therapy from inside the room.