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Our sense of identity begins (our psychological birth sometime in
the first year of life) with the feeling that we are the centre of
the universe, protected by godlike benevolent parents who will
enable us to live happily ever after. This is the "Promise" that is
never given up, lurking in the unconscious part of our minds. We
must learn, reluctantly, that our parents are unable to protect us
from the passage of time, from decline, and from death. Yet we
retain, even as adults, the delusion that, while others may die, we
never will. This adds fuel to the murderous anger we are born with
and must master, alongside the contradictory vertical split in the
mind that we are destined to die. The "Promise" is described in
patients and in examples from biography and fiction in relation to
anniversaries and specific holidays. The book ends with a specific
illustration in relation to an eight-month-old infant.
The main theme of this book concerns the continuing psychic
centrality of parents for their children. Several chapters examine
an author and his works, outlining that author s relationships with
parents, good-and-bad, and making descriptive comments about these
based both on information gleaned from the author s life and
writings as well as from observations found in autobiographies,
biographies and critical works. Since these studies in part concern
stories of child abuse and deprivation, the book predominantly
illustrates bad parenting that seems to have contributed to the
child s psychopathology. Yet in most cases there has also been an
evocation by the trauma and deprivation of adaptive and even
creative reactions--this positive effect also of course largely
attributable to concomitant good parenting--and yet there are some
cases where little of this seems to have existed and yet the
children still turn out to be able to make something of themselves.
The conditions that make for psychic health in a traumatized
childhood are mysterious and can t always be accounted for.The
central mental and emotional importance of the parents in the
earliest development of the child s body and mind is generally
accepted. The continuing lifelong centrality of parental actual and
(predominantly unconscious) psychic presences that can motivate
emotions, thoughts, and actions, and persist for the rest of a
person s life, is frequently not recognized, acknowledged, nor
denied. As the author notes, "We spend so much of our lives,
especially as middle age and old age approaches, waiting for a
magically endowed good parent who will fulfill the promise of our
earliest years, waiting, as Becket puts it, for Godot to restore us
to our narcissistic beginnings, at least intermittently full of the
promise of eternal happy existence."
Our sense of identity begins (our psychological birth sometime in
the first year of life) with the feeling that we are the centre of
the universe, protected by godlike benevolent parents who will
enable us to live happily ever after. This is the "Promise" that is
never given up, lurking in the unconscious part of our minds. We
must learn, reluctantly, that our parents are unable to protect us
from the passage of time, from decline, and from death. Yet we
retain, even as adults, the delusion that, while others may die, we
never will. This adds fuel to the murderous anger we are born with
and must master, alongside the contradictory vertical split in the
mind that we are destined to die. The "Promise" is described in
patients and in examples from biography and fiction in relation to
anniversaries and specific holidays. The book ends with a specific
illustration in relation to an eight-month-old infant.
The main theme of this book concerns the continuing psychic
centrality of parents for their children. Several chapters examine
an author and his works, outlining that author's relationships with
parents, good-and-bad, and making descriptive comments about these
based both on information gleaned from the author's life and
writings as well as from observations found in autobiographies,
biographies and critical works. Since these studies in part concern
stories of child abuse and deprivation, the book predominantly
illustrates bad parenting that seems to have contributed to the
child's psychopathology. Yet in most cases there has also been an
evocation by the trauma and deprivation of adaptive and even
creative reactions--this positive effect also of course largely
attributable to concomitant good parenting--and yet there are some
cases where little of this seems to have existed and yet the
children still turn out to be able to make something of themselves.
The conditions that make for psychic health in a traumatized
childhood are mysterious and can't always be accounted for.
In this richly textured study of personal growth and creativity
hemmed in by childhood disaster, Shengold compares the differing
gifts and differing solutions of extraordinary talents as they seek
to negotiate a universal longing to refind the mother without
sliding back into neglect, abuse, and despair. In the foreground of
his analysis are moving portraits of Jules Renard and Anthony
Trollope and the densely packed traumatic legacy of their
respective childhoods, the one limned in sustained psychological
torture, the other framed by neglect and abandonment. Long
acknowledged as a master of the literary-biographic genre within
psychoanalysis, Shengold does not view the study of creative
individuals as the occasion to make pontifical pronouncements about
the nature of creativity. Rather, he sees such study as affording
the opportunity to borrow from genius, insofar as the gifted writer
who is psychologically astute often captures the challenges of life
and the nuances of suffering in language that "ordinary" patients
would use, if only they could. By integrating literary analysis
with biographical data, Shengold arrives at an appealingly direct,
demystified approach to great literature as a vehicle for
apprehending the intricacies of enduring psychological dilemmas.
For the solutions of truly creative individuals not only reflect an
artistic temperament wed to extraordinarily gifts; they illuminate
the solutions we are all in search of. Elegantly sparing in
language and judicious in presenting source material, Is There Life
Without Mother? is abundantly generous in the wealth of
understanding it provides and the deeper reflection it provokes.
From the subtleties of identification as a means of consolidating
identity in the face of neglect to the return of the traumatic as a
fate that even a writer's "literary revenge" cannot circumvent,
this work takes the reader deeper into the wellsprings of
personality change than that it is usually possible to go.
We are all more primitive and irrational than we care to
acknowledge, says Dr. Leonard Shengold in this profound and
eloquent book. We all suffer to some degree from delusions-vestiges
of infantile mental functioning that continue into adult life and
that at times of crisis manifest themselves in narcissistic
thoughts of omnipotence, immortality, or perfection. Dr. Shengold
argues that we can never eliminate these delusions of everyday
life, but we can lessen their effect if we acknowledge, or "own",
them. He asserts that insight into what we are and what has
happened to us is a prerequisite for caring about others and for
accepting the transient conditions of life-both necessary to attain
happiness. Dr. Shengold discusses delusions we all experience as
well as delusions associated with paranoia, perversions, being in
love, and identification with delusional parents. He illustrates
his ideas by referring to the lives and works of such literary
figures as Shakespeare, Swift, Tolstoy, Pascal, Rilke, Randall
Jarrell, Dickens, Hardy, and, especially, Samuel Butler. Dr.
Shengold also brings in relevant clinical material because, as he
points out, delusions of everyday life are at the heart of
misunderstanding and conflict in life and of resistance to change
in psychological treatment. These delusions must be attenuated if
therapy is to be successful.
Since the publication of Dr. Leonard Shengold's highly acclaimed
book Soul Murder in 1989, issues of child abuse have become the
subject of much public debate. Now Dr. Shengold offers his latest
reflections on the circumstances in which the willful abuse and
neglect of children arises and on the consequences of this abuse,
providing compelling examples from literature and from clinical
material. Dr. Shengold describes various types of child abuse as
well as techniques of adaptation and denial by soul murder victims.
He explores the psychopathology of soul murder, addressing such
issues as instinctual drives, aggression and sexuality, love, and
narcissism. In a chapter on sadomasochism, he relates the story of
Algernon Swinburne-who may have been a victim of soul murder-and he
tells about Elizabeth Bishop, who, like Swinburne, has been able to
use artistic creativity to transcend the damage sustained by early
childhood trauma. Finally he offers suggestions about therapy for
the abused and neglected, emphasizing the need to restore the power
to care about and love others in order to ameliorate soul murder's
narcissistically regressive effects.
In this book the eminent psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold looks at
why some people are resistant to change, even when it seems to
promise a change for the better. Drawing on a lifetime of clinical
experience as well as wide readings of world literature, Shengold
shows how early childhood relationships with parents can lead to a
powerful conviction that change means loss.
Dr. Shengold, who is well known for his work on the lasting effects
of childhood trauma and child abuse in such seminal books as "Soul
Murder" and "Soul Murder Revisited," continues his exploration into
the consequences of early psychological injury and loss. In the
examples of his patients and in the lives and work of such figures
as Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Wordsworth, and Henrik Ibsen,
Shengold looks at the different ways in which unconscious
impressions connected with early experiences and fantasies about
parents are integrated into individual lives. He shows the
difficulties he's encountered with his patients in raising these
memories to the conscious level where they can be known and owned;
and he also shows, in his survey of literary figures, how these
memories can become part of the creative process.
"Haunted by Parents "offers a deeply humane reflection on the
values and limitations of therapy, on memory and the lingering
effects of the past, and on the possibility of recognizing the
promise of the future.
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