But it emphasises also the limit of empathy, explaining why both the wounds of our past and their enactments in the present will continue to haunt us. The affective tone that must colour our strivings, therefore, is neither untrammelled optimism nor hopeless despair: it involves, instead, a tempered liminal space in which we, as citizens, commit ourselves to an unfolding process of searching for moments of meeting where recognition of our shared humanity becomes possible.

There is something almost embodied about the experience of shame - as when a child runs up proudly to its teacher announcing its latest feat, which of course has never before been accomplished anywhere in the history of little people. The bored teacher’s response is as swift as it is mindlessly brutal - it comes in the form of a dispiriting putdown of the child’s vital sense of discovery. Shamed in front of its peers, the emotion sinks in and the child’s body crumples: the shoulders collapse, the stomach drops, the eyes lose focus. That is the unforgettable experience of shame - a self collapsing inwards - an experience encoded in a body, which, from that moment onwards, will forever remember the score.

It is of critical importance to recognise that for people who regard themselves as having no recourse to better their lives, the exercise of violence proves an intoxicating surrogate. Shame - despite its origins in the self - is an excruciatingly public emotion. To feel it is to feel oneself a reprobate. Overcompensation through personal achievement is not an option. When a person feels judged - hounded - by the jury that is public opinion, the only way to exorcise that feeling is to eliminate the jury altogether. In the mind of the perpetrator, transferring one’s own suffering onto another human being becomes a viable - almost noble - moral calculus, turning the master-slave dialectic on its head.

Instead, what appears to be of greatest benefit to patients is the genuineness and persuasiveness of therapists - qualities neither of which are especially flexible in professional training. But as counselling psychologist Paul Moloney points out, if warmth and confidence are the calling cards of successful psychotherapists, then it is worth observing that this principle - and I quote him with some reluctance - “applies equally to politicians, salespeople and prostitutes”.

Recognition, therefore, is not a goal, but a struggle to sustain an emotionally meaningful contact with one’s own experience, and always in the context of the emotional experience of others.