SHAME ‐ MEN AND THE SHAMAN : The wisdom of the crowd in the group treatment of men with antisocial personality disorder

Men with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) are frequently excluded from psychotherapeutic services and are often regarded as resistant to treatment. This paper explores the role of shame and difficulties with intimacy in a long‐term therapeutic group in a non‐custodial outpatient setting for men with ASPD and histories of serious violence. Drawing on psychoanalytic, attachment‐based, and group‐analytic perspectives, we examine how shame—experienced as exposure, humiliation and threat to bodily and psychic integrity—organises both violent behaviour and avoidance of emotional closeness in this population. Using clinical material from a group that has met weekly for over a decade, we illustrate how shame is communicated primarily through action, withdrawal and enactment, rather than explicit verbalisation. Particular attention is paid to moments of heightened relational intensity, including the impending ending of the group, which reactivated anxieties about dependency, loss and abandonment. We suggest that the group itself acquires a containing function that exceeds that of individual members or therapists, functioning as a form of collective regulation or ‘wisdom of the crowd’. This process enables a tentative shift from the management of danger towards the experience of safeness, in which vulnerability and ambivalence can be partially tolerated. The paper argues that sufficiently long‐term group treatment offers a unique opportunity to address the social nature of shame and the profound difficulties with intimacy characteristic of ASPD. Therapeutic change is conceptualised not as symptom reduction, but as the gradual capacity to remain in relationship without resorting to violence or withdrawal.