The Psychology and Philosophy of Humiliation

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 31 August 2026.

Embarrassment, shame, guilt, and humiliation all imply the existence of value systems. Shame and guilt arise primarily from self-appraisal, whereas embarrassment and humiliation arise from the perceived appraisal of others, even if those others exist only in imagination. The distinction between embarrassment and humiliation is that embarrassment often results from our own social missteps, whereas humiliation is imposed upon us through the degrading actions of others.

Jamie tells his teacher that he forgot to do his homework. He feels embarrassment. The teacher reveals this to the whole class. Now he feels even greater embarrassment. The teacher makes him sit in a corner facing the wall, and the whole class laughs at him. This time, he feels humiliation. Had the teacher discreetly given Jamie a failing grade, he would have felt not humiliated but offended. Offence arises primarily from the perception that we have been wronged, insulted, or treated contrary to our values or expectations. Humiliation, on the other hand, arises from the perception that we have been debased, degraded, or stripped of dignity in the eyes of others. Compared to embarrassment, humiliation tends to be more socially exposing and more threatening to one’s sense of status or self-worth.

The mediaeval motif of Aristotle and Phyllis depicts the great philosopher on all fours, bridled and ridden like a horse. Yet, according to the story, Aristotle consented to the arrangement out of lust for Phyllis. Consent can transform the meaning of an otherwise degrading act—which is why the philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that a true masochist could never fulfil the fantasies of a true sadist.

The Latin root of ‘humiliation’ is humus, which means ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Humiliation involves abasement of honour and dignity and, with that, loss of status and standing. We all make certain status claims, however modest they may be, for example, ‘I am a competent doctor’, ‘I am a happily married mother’, or even, ‘I am a human being’. When we are merely embarrassed, our status claims are not seriously undermined—or if they are, they are easily recovered. But when we are humiliated, our status claims cannot so readily be recovered because, in this case, it is our very authority to make status claims that has been called into question. Usually, a person in the run of being humiliated is left stunned and speechless, and, more than that, voiceless. When criticising people, especially people with poor self-esteem, we must find the line between disputing their claims and denying their standing to make those claims.

In short, humiliation is the public failure (or severe undermining) of one’s status claims. It is the experience of having one’s dignity, status, or standing publicly diminished, especially in a way that invites contempt, ridicule, or loss of respect. Private failures may lead to shame, grief, or painful self-realisation, but they are humiliating only insofar as one sees them through the eyes of others.

Notice that humiliation need not be accompanied by shame. Jesus may have been crucified and humiliated, but he surely did not feel any shame. Secure people with the courage of their convictions rarely feel shame at their humiliation—which is, in essence, an attempt to discredit them and their claims.

The Uses of Humiliation

Still today, humiliation is a common form of punishment, abuse, and oppression. Conversely, the fear of humiliation is ordinarily thought to deter crime, and history has devised many forms of humiliating mob punishments. Pillories and stocks restrained victims in a degrading position while people gathered to taunt and torment them. The last recorded use in England of the pillory dates back to 1830, and of the stocks to 1872. Tarring and feathering, which emerged in feudal Europe, involved covering victims with scalding pine tar and feathers before parading them on a cart or wooden rail. In Game of Thrones, Cersei Lannister is stripped and sheared and forced to walk through the streets of King’s Landing to jeers and cries of ‘Shame!’ The ordeal is aimed not merely at punishing her, but at destroying her status claims as a queen and, ultimately, as a person.

In traditional societies and American universities, ritual humiliation can serve to enforce a particular social order, or to reinforce that the group takes precedence over its individual members. Many tribal societies feature complex initiation rites designed to defuse the threat posed by fit, fertile, and often arrogant young men to the male gerontocracy. These rites sometimes include a painful circumcision, which is symbolic of castration.

In more complex, hierarchical societies, the elites go to great lengths to display and defend their social standing, while the lower orders submit to prescribed degrees of abasement. As a society becomes more egalitarian, such rituals are increasingly resented and resisted, which can give rise to violent outbursts and outright revolution. Thus Meghan Markle, who came from a more egalitarian society, famously mocked the practice of curtseying to Queen Elizabeth II, while her husband the duke squirmed by her side.

Because elites live by their pride, and because they embody their people and culture, their humiliation can be especially poignant and emblematic. In 260 CE, the Roman emperor Valerian, after losing the Battle of Edessa, arranged a meeting with Shapur I, the Shahanshah (King of Kings) of the Sassanid Empire. Shapur betrayed the truce and seized Valerian, holding him captive for the rest of his life. According to some accounts, Shapur used Valerian as a footstool when mounting his horse. After Valerian offered Shapur a huge ransom for his release, he was flayed alive or, by another account, made to swallow molten gold. His skin was then stuffed with straw and displayed as a trophy. Even if these accounts of humiliation are invented, or grossly exaggerated, they were invented for a reason.

Humiliation and Human Dignity

Humiliation need not involve aggression or coercion. People can readily be humiliated through more passive means such as being ignored or overlooked, taken for granted, or denied a right or privilege. They can also be humiliated by being rejected, abandoned, abused, betrayed, or used as a means to an end.

Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) argued that, by virtue of their reason and free will, human beings are not means to an end but ends in themselves, with a moral dimension that invests them with dignity and the right to ethical treatment. Therefore, to humiliate people, that is, to treat them as something less than ends-in-themselves, is to deny them their very humanity. Kant sought to ground human dignity in metaphysics; but even if this project must fail, civilisation requires us to behave as if it were a brute fact of nature.

Humiliation can befall anyone at any time—and this is all the more true in the age of social media. As British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne was a credible contender for the leadership of the Liberal Democrat Party. But in February 2012, he was charged with perverting the course of justice over a 2003 speeding ticket. His ex-wife claimed that he had coerced her into accepting the penalty points on his behalf. Huhne resigned from the Cabinet while denying the charge. When the trial opened in February 2013, he changed his plea to ‘guilty’, resigned as a Member of Parliament, and left the Privy Council. By the end of this sorry saga, he had traded a seat in Cabinet for a mattress in a prison cell. Every twist and turn of his downfall had been chronicled in the media, which went so far as to publish highly personal text messages between him and his then 18-year-old son that laid bare their fractious relationship. In a video statement for the 2007 Liberal Democrat Party leadership election campaign, Huhne had stated: ‘Relationships, including particularly family relationships, are actually the most important things in making people happy and fulfilled.’ Although his misdemeanours had been mundane—Huhne was hardly Jack the Ripper—his humiliation could not have been more complete.

Why Humiliation Is Worse Than Death

When we are humiliated, we can almost feel our heart shrivelling. For many months, sometimes years, we may be preoccupied or obsessed by our humiliation and its real or imagined perpetrators. We may respond with anger, fantasies of revenge, sadism, delinquency, or terrorism, among others. We may also internalise the trauma, leading to emotional disturbances such as fear and anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares, sleeplessness, paranoia, social isolation, apathy, depression, and suicidal ideation.

Severe humiliation is, arguably, a fate worse than death itself, insofar as death merely destroys our life, whereas humiliation destroys our standing as well as our life—and leaves us standing, ghostlike, to survey the ruins. For this reason, prison inmates who have suffered severe humiliation are routinely placed on suicide watch.

It is in the nature of humiliation that it undermines the ability of victims to defend themselves against their aggressors. In any case, anger, violence, and revenge are ineffectual responses to humiliation because they do little to reverse or repair the damage done. Victims of humiliation have to find the strength and self-esteem to come to terms with their humiliation—or, if that proves too difficult, abandon the lives that they had made in the hope of starting in another.

I notice that, throughout this essay, I have subconsciously chosen to refer to the subjects of humiliation as ‘victims’, and to the perpetrators as ‘aggressors’. This suggests, along with Kant, that humiliation is rarely if ever a measured or justified response.

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