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REGULAR ARTICLE
Humiliation: Its Nature and
Consequences
Walter J. Torres, PhD, and Raymond M. Bergner, PhD
In this article, we present a new analysis of what is involved when individuals undergo significant public humiliation.
We describe the structure of humiliation—that is, the factors that, taken collectively, render certain life events and
circumstances humiliating; the most common destructive consequences of being subjected to them; and several
personality factors that, when present, can serve to amplify the damaging effects of humiliating experiences. The
analysis is intended to enable forensic clinicians, lawyers, judges, and other relevant parties to understand better
what happens when individuals are humiliated and to identify more precisely the damage that such persons sustain.
It is also intended to have heuristic value for the discussion, confrontation, and alleviation of humiliation in
correctional, jurisprudential, clinical, and general societal contexts.
J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 38:195–204, 2010
I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him
suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate.—Nelson Mandela
1
Humiliation is an important element in many situa-
tions that come to the attention of forensic clinicians.
Its presence and effects are referred to, explicitly or
implicitly, in a range of civil actions, including
wrongful termination, malpractice, libel, civil rights,
and workers’ compensation cases.
2
In criminal cases,
including some highly publicized ones involving
mass murder followed by suicide, humiliation is of-
ten imputed to be a primary motive for the act of
vengeance. Further, it can be a significant element in
situations, such as military, law enforcement, correc-
tional, and medical ones, in which institutions and
individuals are invested with the authority to coerce
others. Finally, humiliation and its consequences
have arisen as topics in a debate regarding the legiti-
macy and value of employing its deliberate public use
as a punishment for offenders (Perlin M, personal
communication, September 2007).
3
Despite its prevalence in forensic contexts, humil-
iation has been subjected to relatively little concep-
tual or empirical scrutiny. Psychoanalytic discus-
sions, while helpful, have been focused primarily on
the role of humiliation in character development and
on character structures that render persons more vul-
nerable to it, but not on understanding the phenom-
enon itself.
4
The formulation of humiliation pre-
sented herein is designed to augment our
understanding of the factors at work and at stake
when it occurs, to enhance our comprehension of its
potentially devastating effects on persons, and to as-
sist those whose jobs include assessing damage, de-
signing or evaluating programs, formulating appro-
priate punishments, and more. The observations
presented derived from clinical practice, both foren-
sic and therapeutic, whereas the general concept of
humiliation was formulated within the framework of
descriptive psychology.
5,6
However, the case exam-
ples represent classic scenerios of humiliation and not
actual clinical cases.
Our discussion has a three-part structure. In part
1, we present an analysis of humiliation and of the
ingredients that render certain life events humiliating
to individuals. In part 2, we detail the specific effects
on individuals of being subjected to humiliating cir-
cumstances and thus of the ways in which humilia-
tion can be so devastating and damaging to them. In
part 3, we discuss psychopathological conditions that
Dr. Torres is in Private Practice of Clinical Psychology, Denver, CO.
Dr. Bergner is Professor, Clinical Counseling Program, Department of
Psychology, Illinois State University, Normal, IL. Address correspon-
dence to: Walter J. Torres, PhD, 3300 E. First Avenue, Suite 590,
Denver, CO 80206. E-mail: walterjtorres@gmail.com.
Disclosures of financial or other conflicts of interest: None.
195Volume 38, Number 2, 2010
may render individuals more subject to humiliation
and its adverse consequences.
What Is Humiliation?
Let us begin our analysis of the nature of humili-
ation by considering three cases (based on real cases
and altered for dramatic and conceptual value and to
prevent identification) in which individuals experi-
enced severely humiliating life events.
Case 1
Joe, a blue collar worker, was seriously injured at
work. As a result, he lost the ability to function in his
usual job, a physically demanding and strenuous one.
His employer had workers’ compensation insurance,
but still had to pay some out-of-pocket expenses to
cover Joe’s treatment and compensation. Subsequent
to treatment, Joe was sent back to work with medi-
cally mandated requirements for accommodations,
as well as restrictions on what kinds of tasks he could
perform. Further, to look out for his rights in this
situation and to maximize his compensation award,
Joe had hired an attorney. His employer was livid.
He resented having to take Joe back into the work-
force at all and decided to accommodate his limita-
tions by instructing Joe’s supervisor to place him in a
highly trafficked public area, through which all the
other laborers had to pass to get to their work sites,
and to assign Joe to work at a table carrying out a
menial task. Everyone, including Joe, knew that the
task he was performing was completely meaningless
and was intended to humiliate him in the eyes of his
coworkers. As a consequence of this treatment, Joe
developed intense but powerless rage, sleeplessness,
and feelings of worthlessness and profound helpless-
ness to change or escape his humiliating circum-
stances. He felt painfully degraded as a worker and as
a man.
Case 2
Jane, a single woman in her thirties, was a middle
manager in a large corporation. Henry, a senior ex-
ecutive, seemed to recognize her talent and took her
under his wing as a mentor. He invited her to com-
pany events where leaders and rising stars of the cor-
poration were core participants and secured roles for
her that positioned her for advancement and leader-
ship. She was delighted by this turn of events and
grateful to her mentor. As events progressed, they
developed a personal relationship that became amo-
rous and sexual. She knew that he was married, but
her feelings for him prevailed over her judgment.
However, several weeks into their personal relation-
ship, he suddenly told her that their relationship
could not continue because he felt obligated to re-
main with his wife. Shortly thereafter, he stopped
taking her to special events and became quite distant
and cold toward her. She began to harbor doubts
both about the honesty of his affection for her and his
initial mentoring and about the validity of her own
talents and potential for advancement. She spoke of
this to no one. She felt betrayed and hurt, troubled by
confusion and self-doubt, and ashamed of her will-
ingness to participate in the affair. A short time later,
while using the toilet at the workplace, she saw scrib-
bled on the stall wall, “Henry nails another one.”
This triggered a flood of humiliation and shame at
what she believed must be a widespread condemna-
tion of her involvement in an affair with a married
executive and of her having been naïvely duped by
this man into believing both that he cared for her and
that she had special abilities that would lead to
advancement.
Going to work became an awful ordeal for Jane.
She became preoccupied with the gnawing sense that
others were deriding, ridiculing, and judging her,
loathed herself for “having been so stupid,” and came
to suspect that in truth she was “really a loser.” She
developed anxiety symptoms that included gastroin-
testinal malaise and frequent vomiting. Jane knew
she could lodge a claim of sexual harassment, but
feared that she might lose such a claim because she
had willingly participated in the affair. She also
feared that it would expose her as someone who was
naïve, stupid, and self-deluded for thinking that
Henry cared for her and for acting as if she had been
a rising star.
Case 3
Tom, a school teacher, had for many years been a
much-admired, kindly figure in his community. In
addition to being well liked and respected, he en-
joyed a secure job position, a nice home, an appar-
ently secure marriage, and more than adequate finan-
cial resources. However, late in his career, it was
revealed that for many years he had been molesting
children in his care. Subsequent to his initial denials
and much public support, more and more of his
former students came forward and testified that they
had been molested by him over more than a decade.
Consequences of Humiliation
196 The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
The evidence became both overwhelming and widely
known, rendering it obvious to virtually everyone in
the community that he was guilty. In the wake of
public certitude about his guilt, he was suspended
from his job pending the decision in his court case.
His wife left him. He became a social pariah who
could no longer present himself in public and faced
an almost certain lengthy jail term.
Ingredient 1: The Status Claim
In all of our examples, we see that the individuals
in question claimed, or attempted to claim, a certain
status. By this we mean that they presented them-
selves to others as the legitimate occupants of, or
bidders for, certain social positions vis-a`-vis these
other persons. They claimed, explicitly or implicitly,
in word or in deed, “I am. . .a legitimate worker not-
withstanding my injury. . .a loved and talented part-
ner of a senior executive. . .an upright, kindly school
teacher who cares about the young children in his
charge.”
Ingredient 2: The Public Failure of the
Status Claim
In all cases, the status claim failed. The individuals
involved either failed to secure the status they aspired
to or lost the status that they had formerly enjoyed or
believed they enjoyed. Further, the failure was a pub-
lic one, meaning that it was witnessed by at least one
other person and possibly, as in one of our examples,
by many people. The disabled worker was placed in a
public situation that subjected him to ridicule and
derision, effectively proclaiming, “How ridiculous
that this man calls himself a worker.” The middle
manager was sexually exploited, duped into believing
that she merited star status, and humiliated by her
discovery that an unknown set of fellow employees
knew that she had been fooled before she did. The
teacher was publicly exposed as a hypocritical mo-
lester of young children and as anything but a true
subscriber to his professed values.
When a status claim fails in a completely private
way, such that no one but the claimant realizes the
failure, the result may be painful self-realization,
but not humiliation. An excellent fictional ac-
count of such a state of affairs may be found in
Camus’ The Fall,
7
in which the protagonist is
forced by a critical life event to recognize that he is
far from being the morally upright altruist he had
always taken himself to be. In the wake of this
realization, he suffers deep disillusionment. How-
ever, since the critical event was unknown to any-
one else, he is not humiliated.
The reasons behind failed status claims can be
quite various. The individual, for example, may have
been making false claims, may not have had the social
skills to make good the claims, or may have encoun-
tered gratuitous derision toward the claims. Further,
other persons who become apprised of the relevant
facts may in some cases conclude that the humilia-
tion is both justified and deserved and in other cases
that it is neither. Such differences in situations, while
they may be important in other respects, make no
difference with respect to what causes a given social
scenario to be humiliating.
Ingredient 3: The Status of the Degrader
to Degrade
Not everyone has the status to degrade another
person, to reject or invalidate a status claim and
thereby “de-grade” the individual in society. For ex-
ample, in the public forum of a jury trial, an expert
witness may characterize a plaintiff’s claim as fraud-
ulent, thus potentially humiliating the latter. How-
ever, it is then established by the plaintiff’s attorney
that, not only is this witness a notorious hired gun
with a long history of testifying in accordance with
the paying party’s wishes, but also his credentials as
an expert are fake. Once he is convincingly ex-
posed as such in court, he loses his status as some-
one who can effectively denounce and thus humil-
iate the plaintiff. By way of further example, a
respected professor of biology once articulated the
theory of natural selection in a lecture, reviewed
key research in its support, and indicated that she
accepted the theory as scientifically well estab-
lished. A student in the front row, however, raised
his hand and responded that it was ridiculous to
believe that humans could have evolved in such a
fashion, that evolution was just a theory, and that
anyone who believed such a thing (by implication,
the professor included) must be both stupid and
impious. This student, however, found himself
surrounded by fellow students who made it known
that they did not share his implicit religious be-
liefs, that they thought the professor’s presenta-
tion was compelling, and that they regarded the
student as completely lacking the status to de-
nounce the professor. Thus, the student’s attempt
at humiliation failed. In these cases, neither the
expert witness nor the critical student had the
Torres and Bergner
197Volume 38, Number 2, 2010
standing in their respective situations to be re-
garded as legitimate and valid assigners or degrad-
ers of status.
Returning to our case examples, had the business
owner confronted Joe’s supervisor and disciplined
him for his vindictive and humiliating treatment
of Joe, or had Jane developed insight early on
about Henry’s intentions and modus operandi, the
status (and thus ability) of these persons to degrade
would have been undermined. Unfortunately,
these resolutions did not happen in either case,
and the persons were left in positions that enabled
them to continue the degrading treatment of their
victims.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, having the
status to degrade another does not imply any special
or exalted social standing. In everyday life, we witness
a wide variety of ordinary citizens lodging degrading
and humiliating claims against others. The patient
accuses the doctor of sexual misconduct. The em-
ployee accuses the employer of harassment. The ad-
olescent accuses the parent of sexual abuse. Such
claims may be honest and legitimate or dishonest and
illegitimate. The key point, however, lies in the fact
that our ordinary presumption is that persons have
the necessary status to denounce and degrade others.
In a manner akin to our regarding others whom we
meet as sane and rational unless our observations
show otherwise, we regard others as veridical report-
ers—in this case, denouncers—unless we see that
there are better reasons not to so regard them. A
female patient accuses the doctor of sexual miscon-
duct. We already know, or subsequently find out,
that the patient is regarded by those who know her as
impeccably honest, that she has never made such an
allegation in the past, that she is a person of means,
and so forth. In the absence of disqualifying evi-
dence, we conclude that her allegation is probably
true. In the case of another such accusation, we al-
ready know or subsequently learn that the accuser is
widely viewed as dishonest, has a criminal record
involving the perpetration of scams, and has an ex-
pensive drug habit. We tend to view her as disquali-
fied and ineligible, as lacking the status to degrade
the doctor as a sexual predator. The practical result is
that, because of our general presumption of the status
and eligibility to denounce and degrade, many peo-
ple will have the misfortune to be successfully, al-
though not legitimately, humiliated.
Ingredient 4: Rejection of the Status to Claim
a Status
Consider the following two refusals of a status bid.
A job applicant receives a letter of rejection that reads
as follows: “Thank you for applying for a position at
XYZ Corp. We received hundreds of applications,
many from fully qualified applicants such as yourself.
It was an extremely difficult decision. However, we
regret to inform you....” Second example: A
woman, in turning down a date request from a young
man, says to him: “I really like you, and if I had met
you a year ago I would have loved to go out with you,
but I’m very involved with someone else now; in fact,
I’m engaged to be married.”
In both of these cases, a bid for a status, that of
employee and that of potential boyfriend, is rejected.
However, the message conveyed in the rejection is
that the bidder was a legitimate candidate and was
fully eligible and entitled to make the bid in question.
Consider, in contrast, a situation in which the letter
of rejection reads, “Given your ridiculously inade-
quate qualifications, we can’t believe you even ap-
plied for this job. What were you thinking?” Or sup-
pose the woman had said to her suitor, “You think I
would be remotely interested in going out with the
likes of you? You’ve got to be kidding!” These refusals
become declarations that, not only is the status claim
or bid rejected, but the very status of the claimant to
make such a status bid or claim is rejected. In these
rejections, the individual is branded a pretender,
someone who had no business making the status
claim to begin with. With this added element, these
messages become humiliations.
In the context of our case examples, the public
message, delivered by only one person or many peo-
ple, becomes: “How ridiculous that you would even
think of presenting yourself as. . .a real worker. . .a
talented and attractive candidate for a top executive’s
love and favor. . .an educator of young children who
truly cares about them and their best interests!”
The critical nature of this element is hard to over-
state. When humiliation annuls the status of individ-
uals to claim status, they are in essence denied eligi-
bility to recover the status that they have lost. They
have effectively lost the voice to make claims within
the relevant community and especially to make
counterclaims on their own behalf to remove their
humiliation. (This is evident, not only conceptually
but phenomenologically. The person who is sud-
denly humiliated in a group is typically left feeling
Consequences of Humiliation
198 The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
stunned and speechless, unable to counterclaim.)
Furthermore, the loss of standing to claim status
within a community is the equivalent of being ren-
dered a nobody within that community. Consistent
with this formulation, some describe the effect of
severe humiliation as an annihilation of the self,
8
and
many humiliated individuals find it necessary to
move to another community to recover their status,
or more broadly, to reconstruct their lives.
This fourth and final element serves to clarify the
distinction between humiliation and embarrass-
ment. In embarrassment, a person discovers such
things as that his zipper is open, that there has been
spinach between his teeth during a just completed
conversation, or that a gossipy comment has been
overheard by its target. Such persons are caught out
of face, in minor violations of social decorum or con-
duct. However, in these and other embarrassing sit-
uations, their status to make status bids or claims is
not rejected. In humiliation, it is.
Summary
In summary, then, an individual suffers humilia-
tion when he makes a bid or claim to a certain social
status, has this bid or claim fail publicly, and has it
fail at the hands of another person or persons who
have the status necessary to reject the claim. Finally,
what is denied is not only the status claim itself, but
also and more fundamentally the individual’s very
status to have made such a claim at all.
Damaging Consequences of Humiliation
Suffering severe humiliation has been shown em-
pirically to plunge individuals into major depres-
sions, suicidal states, and severe anxiety states, in-
cluding ones characteristic of posttraumatic stress
disorder.
9
The following analysis focuses on the most
common direct consequences of experiencing humil-
iation, and clarifies the linkages between being hu-
miliated on the one hand and developing such men-
tal disorders on the other. It should be emphasized
that attention to individual differences is important:
not all humiliated persons experience all these con-
sequences, and different persons experience them to
different degrees. Thus, although humiliation is
powerfully pathogenic, both the nature and degree of
personal harm that any humiliated individual suffers
varies with the specifics of the humiliating circum-
stance and personality and must be assessed on an
individual basis.
Loss of Status and the Resultant Inability
to Behave
An individual’s statuses are crucial determinants
of the range of behavior of which the person is capa-
ble.
6,10
An individual’s statuses are the positions that
are occupied in relation to everything in his world.
These statuses or positions would include, for exam-
ple, social, occupational, and situational roles (e.g.,
husband to one’s wife, employee of one’s company,
or speaker at a conference); disadvantageous posi-
tions vis-a`-vis significant others (e.g., scapegoat in
one’s family of origin or victim of harassment in
one’s workplace); and stigmatized positions in soci-
ety (e.g., criminal, sexual deviant, or mentally ill per-
son). (These examples are provided in the hope that
they will serve to avoid the frequent misinterpreta-
tion of status as prestigious social standing, as in the
expression status-seeker.)
The crucial point of focusing on a person’s status is
that the occupation of certain relational positions
expands one’s range of eligibilities, opportunities,
and reasons to act in valued ways—that is, one’s be-
havior potential.
5,10
The occupation of others con-
stricts such behavior potential. A simple example of
this general truth may be seen in military hierarchies,
in which an individual might occupy the position of
private or of general. The mere occupation of the
latter position by an individual carries with it greatly
expanded eligibilities and powers and thus a range of
possible behavior, relative to the former. For exam-
ple, a general, unlike a private, can give orders to
virtually everyone else in the chain of command, en-
joy a host of officers’ privileges, and have a far greater
voice in important decisions. What status dynamics
emphasizes is that all relational positions convey var-
ious degrees and qualities of behavior potential.
5,10
From this perspective, it can be seen that what
befalls an individual who is successfully subjected to
severely humiliating treatment amounts to a degra-
dation, a literal de-grading, entailing a significant loss
of status that had been, up until then, successfully
claimed and acted on and thus a loss of the individ-
ual’s range of behavioral eligibilities in some commu-
nity or communities.
9,10
It amounts to damaging
these persons’ very ability to behave as members of
their communities, both because they have a new and
degraded status (e.g., malingering worker or sexual
predator) and because they have lost status to claim
status and with this have a greatly impaired ability to
recover their lost status. The first and most basic
Torres and Bergner
199Volume 38, Number 2, 2010
question in assessing the harm befalling an individ-
ual, then, is that of how much and what kind of
degradation, or status loss has been sustained. In gen-
eral, the greater the degree of such loss, the greater the
degree to which the individual is rendered unable to
behave in his world. Is it comparable with our school
teacher, Tom, who lost his whole world? Or is it
more comparable with our injured worker Joe and
our middle manager Jane, who, although severely
humiliated in front of coworkers, may nonetheless
retain considerable standing with and support from
family and friends?
Considerations in determining the severity of any
given humiliation include the following:
How global, and thus broadly socially disquali-
fying, is this individual’s status loss? Has the in-
dividual been degraded to a status such as pedo-
phile that would render him a pariah in every
community or to one such as outcast in organi-
zation X, which is far more narrow and specific?
How fundamental is the status that the individ-
ual has lost? Has the person lost the status to
determine who touches him sexually or lost the
status to determine where and when he may drive
a car?
How core is the community in which the humil-
iation occurs? Did it occur in a community that
is highly central to the individual’s way of life
(e.g., for a practicing physician, the medical com-
munity) or in a community that is more periph-
eral (e.g., that same physician’s tennis club)?
How public is the humiliation? Is it known to
only one other individual or perhaps to an entire
community or even a nation?
How publicly supported is the individual’s deg-
radation? Is there universal concurrence, little
concurrence, or some concurrence that the indi-
vidual merits the degraded status?
Has the humiliation occurred in the context of a
loss such as an arrest, divorce, workplace injury,
or dismissal from a job? In such cases, the indi-
vidual’s status has already been marginalized and
compromised, and there is less alternative stand-
ing to weather the humiliation.
To what extent was malice involved in the hu-
miliation? In the authors’ experience, and consis-
tent with the aggravated effect of trauma that is
inflicted through malice, humiliations carried
out with malicious intent to degrade another can
be particularly devastating.
Finally, and very critically, to what degree has the
individual lost the status to make status claims?
To what degree has the person been effectively
silenced and nullified and lost all credible voice
and opportunity for recovering from the
degradation?
Hopelessness, Helplessness, and Suicide
Individuals who have been subjected to the most
severe and public of humiliations frequently experi-
ence feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Lack-
ing the ability to make effective appeals on their own
behalf, they have no discernible way back, no avenue
to recover and have a better future. Furthermore,
their status as a nobody in their former community
can be excruciatingly painful and may sometimes be-
come intolerable. For example, in the case of Tom,
the school teacher, after he was regarded by virtually
everyone in his community as an individual whose
claims of model citizenship concealed his being a
child molester, liar, and moral sham, he lost com-
pletely his ability to make any claims on his own
behalf that could bring about recovery of his lost
status. He had lost not only his whole world, but with
this loss of voice, any hope of recovering his place in
that world. In such situations, the grave danger arises
that the individual may commit suicide.
Powerless Rage and Possible Murder
Understandably, the anger provoked by being se-
verely publicly humiliated, particularly when the hu-
miliation is experienced as unjust and undeserved,
can be extreme. Such a response was the case for Joe,
our injured worker, who was forced to spend every
day engaging in meaningless work in front of his
coworkers. Naturally, such humiliations evoke pow-
erless rage, the urge to protest, and a strong desire to
seek redress. However, humiliated individuals, who
have now lost the status of persons who can effec-
tively make status claims on their own behalf within
their communities, no longer have any voice within
these communities to make their case and have it
considered. Thus, although their anger is often in-
tense, they are powerless to act within their commu-
nities to recover their former status. In this situation,
some individuals assume a new, powerful, and po-
tentially quite dangerous status, that of an outsider
Consequences of Humiliation
200 The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
who has become an enemy of the community. Such
persons come to believe that they have no other re-
course but to take revenge on the community itself
through some form of violence. However, in perpe-
trating acts of violence, they effectively end the pos-
sibility of attaining future standing in this or in any
community (except perhaps prison), and they are left
nowhere. Their lives in this sense are over and dis-
pensable, and they may reasonably regard suicide as
necessary, tolerable, and perhaps even convenient
collateral damage. Such a scenario is often reported
in the news in which a humiliated employee or stu-
dent goes on a rampage, kills many innocent cowork-
ers or fellow students, and then commits suicide.
8
Disabling Preemptive Motivation
Many humiliated individuals find themselves pre-
emptively motivated by their circumstances, by the
need to recover from them and by the need to gain
revenge on their humiliators. The motives surround-
ing the humiliation become so powerful and all-
consuming that they largely preempt all other moti-
vations in the person’s life. Other concerns fade into
the background. The individual cannot focus on
these matters, cannot concentrate, and is constantly
distracted by the humiliating situation and its impli-
cations. Jane, the middle manager, found herself so
completely consumed by her situation that she could
not concentrate at work, in social situations, or even
while trying to watch a television show. Many eve-
nings she could not sleep because of her obsessive
preoccupation with her circumstances. In our expe-
rience, most severely humiliated persons, like Jane,
find their ability to function to be greatly impaired in
the other important spheres of their lives, such as
their families, friendships, and jobs.
Loss of Status as an Appraiser of Reality
When individuals are humiliated in such a way
that their fundamental capacity to read reality is suc-
cessfully discounted and invalidated, the effects can
be particularly devastating. We are referring to indi-
viduals whose reading of important realities is pe-
remptorily and successfully dismissed and dis-
counted as not to be taken seriously, or pointedly
labeled as crazy, irrational, hopelessly biased, or beset
by a psychosomatic problem that renders their claims
and experiences of pain and impairment as all in their
heads. In these circumstances, that which serves as
the basis for making claims in the real world (i.e., the
capacity to read reality correctly) is invalidated, and
such individuals are left with little or no voice or
foundation to make any claims.
Loss of Status to Claim Basic Human Rights
The status to claim the enjoyment of basic human
rights is, by its nature, a core, fundamental status. A
humiliation that involves public demonstration of an
individual’s inability to claim such rights has a dev-
astating effect. For example, individuals in wartime
who are forced by their captors, against all of their
cultural and religious beliefs, to strip naked, to be led
around on all fours on a leash, or to witness the rape
of their own wives and daughters, would be examples
of persons humiliated in this way. These situations
constitute de facto “degradation ceremonies”
9
in
which the message to the degraded individual is: “If
there is something that you most want to resist, it is
this. Yet, look at you. Look how utterly powerless
you are to claim what is most essential to you.” The
ceremony establishes publicly the individual’s utter
helplessness to make the most elemental claims
against violations of that which he holds most essen-
tial and cherished. If the individual does not have the
status to make the most elemental of claims, what
status has he left? Indeed, these kinds of degradations
may be perpetrated to engender a profound sense of
powerlessness to make claims of any sort. Thus, they
are enacted to disempower fundamentally not only
individuals, but whole ethnic and religious groups.
Of course, humiliations such as these need not occur
only in the context of war or political subjugation; for
example, victims of rape or of sexual harassment liv-
ing in ordinary society may experience precisely this
kind of devastating humiliation. Finally, going back
to the humiliating treatment of both Joe and Jane,
one could argue that there is a basic human right not
to be subjected to gratuitous public humiliation
itself.
Sense of Worthlessness
Severely humiliated individuals often experience a
sense of worthlessness. The reasons for this should be
clear when we consider the plight of a person who has
suffered many or all of the consequences delineated
herein. The individual has sustained a massive loss of
status in the world, has been left without an effective
voice to recover, has been rendered a nobody who is
helpless and hopeless, has become unable to function
well in other critical spheres of life such as family and
Torres and Bergner
201Volume 38, Number 2, 2010
job, has been branded and seen by others as unable
even to read reality correctly, or has been forced to
submit to treatment that is a gross violation of basic
human rights. It is little wonder that the result would
more often than not be profound feelings of
worthlessness.
Psychopathological Conditions That
Render Persons More Vulnerable
to Humiliation
Certain pathological conditions, and in particular
the kinds of personalities who are most prone to in-
cur them, engender a greater than usual vulnerability
to the detrimental effects of humiliation. These con-
ditions and personalities can markedly aggravate or
magnify the effects of humiliating experiences, gen-
erate the perception of humiliation where there was
none, or even invite humiliation from others. The
disorders discussed in the following sections stand
out in this regard, but the list is not intended to be
exhaustive.
Depressive Disorders
Long-noted characteristics of persons who are
prone to depression are their low self-esteem and
their proclivity to blame themselves for negative life
events.
11
One famous and well-researched account,
for example, characterizes these persons as having an
insidious attributional style
11
in which, when bad
things happen, they tend automatically to attribute
them to factors that are internal (i.e., to negative
personal qualities within them such as unlovability,
inadequacy, or stupidity), stable (i.e., unlikely ever to
change), and global (i.e., affecting not just this event
but many things in their lives). Given their initial
sense of unworthiness, as well as this highly self-
blaming and self-destructive attributional style, these
persons are all too ready to succumb to humiliating
indictments, and tremendously impaired in their
ability to make strong counterclaims on their own
behalf. Thus, they are far more vulnerable and suffer
far more seriously the adverse effects of humiliating
events, and often experience profound senses of
hopelessness and helplessness in the face of them.
Social Phobia and Avoidant Personality Disorder
Individuals with these disorders, who have strong
senses of personal inadequacy and unacceptability,
live in dread that they will say or do something (e.g.,
make an inappropriate comment, give a poor perfor-
mance, vomit, or faint) that will expose them to scru-
tiny and harsh criticism from others.
12–14
Extremely
sensitive to negative evaluation, they constantly scan
the social environment for the possibility that their
actions will be seen and exposed as those of an im-
postor, an incompetent, or some other kind of
shameful person. They are unusually ready to inter-
pret critical, rejecting stances or even inadvertent,
accidental dismissals from others as crushing humil-
iations, and to suffer accordingly. Given such general
sensitivities and vulnerabilities, the level of humilia-
tion they experience from an actual severe public
humiliation tends to be more extreme than that of
the average individual.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Persons with narcissistic personality disorder are
viewed by most theorists as individuals who, despite
outward appearances, are beset with an underlying
sense of personal unworthiness and unacceptabil-
ity.
15–17
Unable to truly esteem themselves, they des-
perately pursue a compensatory life strategy of con-
vincing themselves that they are actually special
persons who are set apart from and above other peo-
ple, and seeking the acclaim of others by making
public claims (e.g., of special talent, brilliance, or
accomplishment) of a highly self-aggrandizing na-
ture designed to win the admiration and affection of
these others. When these claims fail, narcissists, un-
like persons with more solidly grounded self-esteem,
are highly humiliation-sensitive, prone to overreact
to minor criticisms or failures of others to value them
and to react with bitter anger or vicious counterhu-
miliations. At times, narcissistic persons engineer
their own humiliation by making grandiose claims
that are simply false and that subsequently result in
public exposure. Although narcissists can be adept at
evading these humiliations through self-serving ra-
tionalizations that debase their would-be humilia-
tors, their defensive maneuvers often fail, leaving
them feeling deeply humiliated and enraged.
A Common Thread
It is notable that a common feature of all of these
personalities is an underlying lack of self-esteem. By
definition, when we speak of self-esteem, we are talk-
ing about the esteem in which persons hold them-
selves. In the case of low or poor self-esteem, we are
talking about individuals who, as critics of them-
selves, have made the summary appraisal that they
Consequences of Humiliation
202 The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
are persons of little worth.
18
Thus, when the humil-
iating allegations and mistreatments from external
detractors occur, they are generally at a great disad-
vantage. Believing the worst of themselves, they are
all too ready to concur in the degrading indictments
of their humiliators and are very ill-prepared to de-
fend themselves from them.
Uses of the Present Formulation
The practical uses of this analysis of humiliation
and its consequences lie in forensic, clinical, institu-
tional, and scientific domains. In closing, we shall
briefly relate some of the more important of these.
Forensic Uses
The present analysis can assist all concerned in
forensic situations—clinicians, attorneys, judges,
jury members, and clients—to understand better
what is involved and what is at issue in cases of hu-
miliation and thus to make more informed judg-
ments concerning this important matter. For exam-
ple, the detailed articulation presented herein of the
many consequences that can result from severe hu-
miliation may be employed as a kind of checklist by
clinicians and attorneys to identify the precise ways
in which specific clients have been injured, enabling
them to provide judges and juries with detailed, ra-
tionally grounded cause-effect accounts of the nature
and extent of clients’ injuries. Further, the analysis of
the relationship between certain psychopathological
conditions and humiliation may serve as an impor-
tant qualifier in determinations both of the causality
of humiliation and of its consequences.
Therapeutic Uses
Employing the kind of informed clinical assess-
ments of their patients’ situations and personal con-
ditions just described, psychotherapists may use the
present analysis, as well as the status dynamic frame-
work within which it is embedded,
19
to design inter-
ventions that comprehend and meet the precise
needs of their clients. We intend to describe such
interventions in a future publication.
Program Design and Modification
The delineation of the conditions that constitute
humiliation may allow or promote better identifica-
tion of its actual or potential occurrence in program-
matic and other institutional settings. It may thereby
better position administrators to institute processes
and procedures that serve to recognize, correct, and
prevent it. Our observation has been that humilia-
tion tends to be under-recognized, trivialized, and
insufficiently confronted in many kinds of settings.
Due Process and Punishment
This application concerns those charged with the
duty to construct or evaluate prosecution and pun-
ishment of offenders. Punishments by their very na-
ture involve some element of loss of status. The in-
carcerated individual, the demoted soldier, the
person whose driver’s license is revoked, all lose the
status to engage in activities for which they had been
eligible before their punishment. What appears to
distinguish humiliating from nonhumiliating prose-
cution and punishment is the formal or informal due
process that acknowledges the individual as having
rights as a status claimant. Consistent with the es-
sence of this article’s formulation, the due process
that is the core of our system of jurisprudence appears
designed to protect individuals from humiliation
through the assiduous protection of their status to
claim a status: no denunciation or punishment can
be leveled without honoring the right of the accused,
with the assistance of counsel, to lodge counterclaims
and to have his claims receive due consideration. It is
for this reason that we do not ordinarily regard a trial
and conviction, despite its public nature, as humili-
ating per se, by virtue of its very structure. (Of course,
a prosecution and conviction may constitute a hu-
miliation for an individual because of the nature of
the offense, particular personal characteristics, the
contrast between preindictment status claims and the
ultimate findings in the case, and more.)
On the other hand, denunciations and punish-
ments that are delivered without the accused’s having
recourse to defending himself are humiliating by the
very fact that the individual has been deprived of the
essential status of one who is entitled to make a coun-
terclaim. Most obviously, judicial systems in which
the accused is denied counsel are for this reason
highly degrading. One could argue that they are de
facto instances of the denial, discussed earlier, of basic
human rights. However, other less obvious punish-
ments and sentences can be considered in this regard.
For example, “branding” type punishments (e.g.,
ones in which convicted individuals are forced to
wear a sandwich board that declares their offenses, or
ones in which they must drive with a license plate
that labels them drunken drivers) are designed to
Torres and Bergner
203Volume 38, Number 2, 2010
expose the individual to the degrading judgment of
peers outside of the judicial setting, without recourse
to a counterclaim. Such punishments violate the tra-
ditional protection of the status to claim a status that
is otherwise so firmly adhered to in our system of
jurisprudence.
Research Design
The delineation of the conditions that constitute
humiliation may allow researchers to identify more
clearly and investigate its occurrence and its personal
and societal consequences.
Conclusions
In this article, we have presented an analysis of
what is involved when individuals undergo severe
public humiliation. We have described the structure
of humiliation, i.e., the factors that, taken collec-
tively, render certain life events and circumstances
humiliating ones for persons; the most common
damaging consequences of being subjected to these;
several personality factors that, when present, can
serve to facilitate humiliation and amplify its damag-
ing effects; and some applications of the present anal-
ysis in a variety of forensic, clinical, institutional, and
scientific contexts.
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