The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-abasement \Self`-a*base"ment\, n.
Degradation of one's self by one's own act.
Humiliation or abasement proceeding from consciousness of inferiority, guilt, or shame.
Wiktionary
n. self-punishment in order to atone for some real or imagined wrongdoing.
WordNet
n. voluntary self-punishment in order to atone for some wrongdoing [syn: penance, self-mortification]
Wikipedia
Self-abasement is voluntary self-punishment or humiliation in order to atone for some real or imagined wrongdoing.
Self-abasement might have a religious aspect for those seeking humility before God, perhaps in the context of monastic or cenobitic lifestyle.
It also has a sexual and fetish aspect for those people who enjoy erotic humiliation and other related BDSM practices.
Examples of self-abasement practices include self-flagellation, bondage, torture, public humiliation (including online humiliation).
In psychology, self-abasement is associated with shame (rather than guilt) and involves the reduction of the subject's self-esteem. The notion of self-abasement can be said to be based in Freudian psychoanalysis. Fear may also result in self-abasement.
Usage examples of "self-abasement".
Both exhibit a fierce pride, a drive toward masochistic self-abasement, and an undying hatred of their persecutors and oppressors.
What looks to us now like the most unctuous kind of self-abasement was symbolic of civilisation.
Once, he was stopped by a trio of hairy and verminous keelboatmen who demanded his business-it took all the diplomacy of self-abasement he could muster to get out of the confrontation with no more than tobacco on his shirt-and as he passed the two-room plank shed owned and operated by a woman known as Kentucky Williams, that harridan and the ladies of her employ, sitting uncorseted in their shabby petticoats on the sills of their open French doors, rained him with orange-peels, cigar-butts, and some of the most scatalogical language he had ever heard in his life.
The sprite of contrariety mounted to her brain to indemnify her for her recent self-abasement.