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Our sense of identity (our psychological birth sometime in the first year of life) begins with the feeling that we are the center of the universe, protected by godlike benevolent parents who will enable us to live happily ever after.This is the “Promise” that is never given up, lurking in the unconscious part of our minds. We must learn, reluctantly, that our parents are unable to protect us from the passage of time, from decline, and from death. Yet we retain, even as adults, the delusion that, while others may die, we never will. This adds fuel to the murderous anger we are born with and must master, alongside the contradictory vertical split in the mind that we are destined to die. The “Promise” is described in patients and in examples from biography and fiction in relation to anniversaries and specific holidays. The book ends with a specific illustration in relation to an eight-month-old infant.
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THE PROMISE THE PROMISE Who is in Charge of Time and Space? Leonard Shengold First published in 2015 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2015 by Leonard Shengold The right of Leonard Shengold to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-150-2 Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain www.karnacbooks.com I love to doubt as well as know. —Dante, Inferno All contradictions are to be found in me in some shape or manner. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; ingenious, stupid; morose, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; and liberal, and miserly, as I turn myself about; and whoever studies himself very attentively finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this mutability and discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply and solidly. —Montaigne, “The Inconsistency of our Actions”, Essays, Book Two The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties. Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best. And almost nothing we are told remains the same when retold. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.” —Traditional Negro spiritual CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR xi PREFACE xiii INTRODUCTION xv PART I: CLINICAL AND LITERARY STUDIES CHAPTER ONE Promise, change, and trauma 3 CHAPTER TWO On the trauma of seeing mother’s genitals 13 CHAPTER THREE Chronic trauma and soul murder: literary and clinical examples 17 CHAPTER FOUR Haunting and parricide 21 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER FIVE Virginia Woolf haunted 29 CHAPTER SIX Rage as a fact of life (or, Who is in Charge of Time and Space?) 43 CHAPTER SEVEN Killing (or not killing) the king 51 CHAPTER EIGHT Vladimir Nabokov: murderous impulses displaced onto Freud and literary rivals—and sublimated in relation to butterflies and chess 63 PART II: YEARLY REPETITIONS EVOKING THE BOOK’S TITLE CHAPTER NINE The psychological effect of birthdays and anniversaries 79 CHAPTER TEN Jewish holidays: Chanukah, Purim, Passover, Rosh Hashana, and Yom Kippur 89 CHAPTER ELEVEN Christian holidays: Christmas, New Year’s Day, Lent, and Easter