528
PARTISAN REVIEW
selves
to
the expensive rigors of classical psychoanalysis, to begin with.)
Take A., the young woman who appears in the chapter entitled, "The
Metaphor of the Mirror": "The girl's initial complaints were of feeling
unattractive, selfish, and unworthy. She suffered from suppressed rage and
from bouts of sadomasochistically provocative behavior." During her
treatment with Shengold, which involves much analysis of both actual
and metaphorical mirroring (that is, the various means by which we
catch glimpses of the reflected self), A. discovers that the mother she had
once thought of as "wonderful" was, in fact, a bad introject - in lay–
man's terms, a wretched nurturer: "a predominantly selfish, angry, irra–
tional person ... who required complete compliance and admiration
from her daughter."
As if this weren't enough, it also emerges that A.'s mother (as is
true of most of Shengold's patients' parents) was given to exhibitionistic
sexual displays - "fully displaying her vagina and anus," as well as mastur–
bating in front of her daughter. Shengold postulates that in order to
ward off "the terrible rage, felt as a magic murderous power" these
experiences invoked in her as a young girl, A. turned
to
"the narcissistic
promise" of the mirror. "To be in the bath water with mother,
to
gaze
at her own image in the mirror (like Narcissus), would surely bring back
'everything': the timeless peace of the baby at the breast.... " Armed
with this reconstructed knowledge of herself, A. goes off to live the life
of "common unhappiness" that the unsanguine Freud, faced with
his
brood of roilingly unhappy patients, stipulated was the light at the end
of the tunnel of "hysterical misery." She marries "a rather passive but
loving man," moves to another part of the country, has two children
whose upbringing she leaves mostly to "a good motherly housekeeper"
(thus, presumably, sparing her children the repetition of the only form of
mothering she herself had known) and is successful in her unnamed pro–
fession. Her mother remains a sore point. "The introject of her mother
... still lurked in her mind and could emerge in circumstances that fos–
tered regression (such as her mother's illnesses).. ." but, given the va–
garies of A. 's situation, is handled as well as can be hoped for.
There are other patients in Shengold's account, all suffering from
various painful disorders of character which lend themselves
to
this
pyschoanalyst's particular version of What Went Wrong When. In
COI1-
trast to the general theoretical trend, which has been to place key
developmental issues in the oral (dependent) or phallic (oedipal) stages,
Shengold focuses on the anal (sadistic) phase - roughly equivalent
to
the
Terrible Twos. The results are predictably woeful, although his insistence
on inhabiting an anally-focused interpretive universe can sometimes lead
to comical, a-cigar-is-never-a-cigar findings: "Phones were always dialed
in the years of F.'s childhood, and thinking about spinning the dial with
