DAPHNE MERKIN
531
pathology
to
account for.") It appears to be, finally, a more arbitrary
call for most of us than one would have thought. To wit, given a
requisite level of functioning, you are less likely to seek - or to be
viewed as needing - psychiatric help the more you can get the world to
fit around your particular set of needs. If you're Howard Hughes, for in–
stance, and can afford the upkeep on your phobias, you're in luck. I ask
Shengold for a baseline definition of psychological normalcy: "No life,"
he points out, "is free of shadow ... It's enough," he says, "to feel 'I'm
worthwhile' alongside 'I'm no good.' "
And what about that ameliorative phrase coined by the British
psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott - "good enough mothering" - Shengold
keeps coming back to in his book, that all-important precondition
which serves as a buffer against the slings and arrows of fortune? About
its relevance Shengold leaves no doubt - "It's the most important aspect
of psychic health , it provides the foundation." I am curious to know
what precisely this critical nurturing consists of and how you know if the
mother you've had is a Mommy Dearest or a Mommy Good Enough.
Shengold obligingly explains that it hinges mostly on a basic feeling of
self-acceptance, that "it's all right to be you." (Perhaps it can't be
helped, but I wonder why there comes a point at which even the most
abstruse of analysts begins to sprout psychobabble of the "How to Be
Your Own Best Friend" pop-culture variety.) As to
good enough,
what
that seems to translate into is, ''I'm loved by my mother, by and large."
Since even the rosiest of maternal scenarios includes, according to
Shengold, an inevitable falling-off (from what he describes as "the
postulated primal bliss at the bre:lSt"), I deduce that, had there been a
mother in the Garden of Eden, she too would have had her bad
moments.
Still, the feeling that one has been insufficiently loved is so prevalent
in our culture that Shengold confides he has written a paper about
patients who misconstrue their childhoods as emotionally deprived -
based on their reading of Alice Miller, etc. - when their parents have
actually been
too
indulgent. This strikes me as an interesting development
- due, undoubtedly, to a tendency in our culture to dilute complex ideas
in the interest of popularizing them, only to then misappropriate them.
This phenomenon is also traceable, I can't help thinking, to the very
laxness of meaning embodied in a term - corralled by Shengold himself -
such as "soul murder."
What remains unaddressed are the very real therapeutic issues of
neglect or abuse - those patients for whom a sense of being damaged is
appropriate rather than manufactured. I press Shengold: What if one
didn't, in fact, get the requisite "loving care" without which separation
becomes fraught with difficulty? Where does this leave one? Immured
