530
PARTISAN REVIEW
had made it clear on the phone that he was alloting me a spare thera–
peutic hour. Was I expecting to meet a man as grave as his pronounce–
ments, adrift in the tormented
Weltanschauung
he perceived in those who
came to him for help? If so, I am proven wrong. From behind his clut–
tered desk in a small office, the bearded and bespectacled analyst seems
surprisingly matter-of-fact, even perky. It occurrs to me more than once
in my conversation with Shengold that doing this kind of work requires
a thickened skin. Too much detachment, and you won't understand the
emotional lower depths; too much empathy, and what use are you,
wailing along with your patients that indeed your parents did you
wrong and that there's no hope for the future?
Shengold readily admits that
Father, Don't
YOII
See ['m Bllrning?,
concentrating as it does on "the inherent primal discontents" of our ex–
istence, presents a "skewed point of view." "I think," he says, "this last
book is a particularly gloomy book." He goes on to reveal that he's had
"many complaints" about it from early readers, including friends and
family. I am somewhat relieved to find that the book's unremitting
mis–
ericorde
has struck others beside myself and that their instinct, like mine,
has been to resist it. Still, Shengold maintains that this darkness of tone is
the very nature of the beast, that "therapy contains unpleasant truths that
people don't want to hear about." As a prime example, he points to
child abuse, which, he says, with a poetic turn of phrase, "disturbs the
peace of the world."
I mention to the analyst that I have been struck by his copious ex–
tradisciplinary reading; even when not explicitly about literary texts, his
essays are full of the sort of determinedly bibliophilic analogies one
doesn't ordinarily expect to find in psychoanalytical works. Shengold
attributes his bookish bent to the influence of Lionel Trilling, whose
classes he took at Columbia. He believes that Freud's insights are "deeper
than what anyone else has come along with," yet he is quick
to
concede
that "analysis isn't the treatment for everybody." I find myself wondering
out loud why it is that often the people one would think would benefit
from it most are least likely to be found partaking of "the talking cure"
(as Freud called it), and Shengold suggests that both the "too well" and
the "too sick" are unlikely
to
turn up on his doorstep. Paradoxically
enough, you need a certain amount of health to undergo this treatment,
as well as a degree of acknowledged internal distress; in other words,
those who are "too defended" - who have constructed enough armor
around their problems not to feel discomfited by them - are less likely
to be motivated.
Interestingly, psychic health, from an analyst's point of view, is not
the same thing as adaptive behavior, from the layman's point of view.
("Health," the author remarks in a footnote, "is even harder than
