by Maria Cristina Piauhy Silva Mendes
“A person is the sum total of his life expe-riences, each of which is registered in his personality and structured in his body.”
Alexander Lowen
Abstract
The purpose of this work is to situate the shame in the stages of the life cycle. As each crisis belongs to a life cycle, the shame may appear as one of the components presents relative about the changes. This article has a theoretical foundation the work of Erik Erikson, Psychosocial Develop-ment, where he includes the idea of development throughout all the life cycle. When a life cycle changes, new challenges unleash a crisis. The stages of human development are “crisis situations”, solvingproblems sit-uation (or not) that arise both from psychic and biological maturation and from the encounters with the social/ relational reality to which the person has been presented. In the crisis, the shame could appear as something re-sulting from unresolved crisis situation from past stages, which are reac-tivated or that arise in the current phase
Keywords: Shame, Life Cycle, Crisis, Body.