DAPHNE MERKIN
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fingers elicited his anal erogeneity and impulses toward anal masturbation.
. . ." We get to meet the aforementioned F., who is a "swinging
bachelor" with "desperately warded-off homosexual impulses"; G., a
homosexual, who masturbates while on the telephone and who
remembers being frightened by the sight of his mother's "large,
'castrating' genitals"; and R., who suffers from "low self-esteem" in spite
of her "aura of self-confidence." (Her analysis reveals - what else? -
"intense rage and sadomasochism. ") There is also the patient who leads
"a life of inhibited, largely sadomasochistic heterosexuality" due to hav–
ing been seduced as an adolescent by an older woman who made use of
his bent knee for orgasmic purposesO), and yet another, V., who is sym–
biotically attached to his mother and has violent fantasies about the chil–
dren he sees on the street. Shengold pronounces with due direness upon
all these clamorous visitors to his office; mired in the muck of their re–
spective grim realities, their histories being to sound like so many dark
parodies - a
Saturday Night Live
send-up of the "Personals" columns.
Interspersed with the anecdotes of misery and pent-up fury provided
by his clinical material, Shengold limns a stark human trajectory - from a
state of infantile narcissism ("the mindless everythingness of the womb")
to one of adaptive unpleasure ("the something that lies between every–
thing and nothing") to the final "beckoning nothingness" of death. In
what seem to me to be some of the book's more satisfYing chapters, he
turns away from live subjects to literary examples. An assiduous reader
and a resourceful critic, Shengold probes the regressive yearnings of King
Lear and his painful arrival at self-renunciatory love at the close of
Shakespeare's play to demonstrate his notion of the "hostile dependency"
we are all born into, as well as the resolutions we can avail ourselves of
while stuck in the predicament of living our lives. His dissection of Ib–
sen's conflicting pulls toward bourgeois caution and passionate abandon
as enacted in his last plays, specifically
The Master Builder,
is illuminating
in a way that his case histories often are not. Perhaps this is due to some
innate theoretical bent in the author himself which makes him a better
(that is, less reductionist) reader of texts than of people, or perhaps it is
no more than that the tragic note is more sonorous when struck in
literary masterpieces than when sounded in an office on the Upper East
Side - where it too often turns to bleak music, and the unpaid listener is
likely to turn a deaf ear.
*
*
*
I went to see Dr. Shengold not long ago, on a rainy Friday
morning, to talk with him about his book and the current state of the
psychoanalytic art. My appointment was for ten o'clock, and the doctor
