Shame goes to one's basic sense of self and is not often experienced as embarrassment or humiliation. The experience of shame is invariably and literally humbling. Shame is in many instances a normal enough feeling but it becomes emotionally dangerous when it starts to color one's most basic idea about who one is, or how worth one is. But pathological shame would be when that same feeling arises with every rebuke or small failure, or as a subtext in all one's relationships because of some presumed character flaw such as a constant feeling of dependency. It's been the ignored emotion in psychology.
Shame is seen by psychoanalysts as emerging earlier in psychological development than guilt.
Freud's work paid more attention to guilt than shame, but recent theorists, particularly Heinz Kohut, have focused on the role of shame in psychological problems. The recent interest in shame has also been spurred by developmental psychologists who, studying the emergence of the self in infancy, have found a sense of shame to be part of that process. Feelings of shame begin to emerge in the second year of life, at the very formation of the infant's sense of self, developmental psychologists say. As the infant realizes that he is a separate person, he is first able to understand that others are directing emotional messages to him. By 16 or 18 months, though, they begin to be aware of whether the feelings are directed at them.