Peinlichkeit

Embarrassment is classically reduced either to its visible, superficial level, and viewed as faux pas; or conceived emotionally as negative self esteem or social fear. Julia Döring, on the other hand, understands embarrassment as a genuinely communicative phenomenon, whereby an inner level of experience can be distinguished from an external level of event. With this fundamental analytical differentiation, she develops a comprehensive conceptual inventory of embarrassment, which also includes special forms of embarrassment, like so-called 'Fremdscham' ( 'surrogate embarrassment' ). By way of an empirical study on modern bachelor parties, she furthermore identifies possibilities, meanings and functions of ritualized embarrassment.