DAPHNE MERKIN
527
this is precisely what most of us are looking for), the Freudian embrace is
hardly a cuddly one.
The
notion of ourselves as starting clean, as having entered the
world innocent as babes (an image that the Victorians were the last to
wholeheartedly embrace), free of "adult" emotions such as anger, envy,
and lust, has been banished forever by the radical diorama of psychic
de–
velopment constructed by Freud and his followers.
It
seems
that from the
moment
we
exit the womb our psyches begin inexorably to take shape:
We are rapidly evolving, even while still tiny creatures suckling on our
mothers' breasts, into beings riddled with conflicts and drives. Given this
clouded-over view of our beginnings, the potential for malfunctioning is
obviously enormous, and the requirements for proper nurturance - for
"good enough" care and feeding - are well-nigh impossible to
come
by.
It
is small wonder, then, that the question which haunts our
contemporary consciousness skirts the issue of potential resilience all
together, concentrating instead on our abject vulnerability to
environmental forces beyond our control: Mirror, mirror on the wall,
who's the most damaged of us all?
This is a question sure to occur to anyone who reads
Father, Don't
You See I'm Bllming?
(Yale University Press), a recent collection of essays
by Leonard Shengold. The book takes an unsparing look at the ag–
gressive forces that are part of the human endowment; its hefty subtitle
alone,
Reflectiolls Or! Sex, Narcissism, Symbolism, and Murder: From Every–
thing to Nothing,
gives an indication of the book's pessimism, its
persistently negative orientation. As befits an
echt,
true-blue follower in
Freud's footsteps, Shengold's is an essentially tragic vision. The author's
focus is on the unavoidable vicissitudes inherent in human development,
which include often unbearable frustration over our never entirely
relinquished wish for "everything" - "the wish," as he puts it, "to have
exclusive possession of both mother and father." Like Alice Miller, the
Swiss lay therapist whose heated writings in such books as
Prisoners oj
Childhood
and
Ballished Knowledge
have remolded our notions of child
abuse, Shengold seems to suggest that the possibility of profound
psychological harm occurring during early childhood is more likely than
not.
Shengold, who has written two previous books,
Halo in the Sky
and
SOIlI Mllrder: The Effects oj Childhood Abuse and Deprivation,
is a
practicing psychoanalyst in New York City, and the patients he offers up
(composites, to be sure) for clinical scrutiny are a plagued lot, indeed.
Their histories range from bad to worse; as adults they yearn for what
they can't have and are enraged about what they've been given. (Then
again, one hardly expects contented, self-satisfied sorts to submit them-
