If You Can’t Trust Your Mother, Who Can You Trust?: Soul Murder, Psychoanalysis and Creativity

335 Pages·2013·1.476 MB·English

by  Leonard Shengold

IF YOU CAN’T TRUST YOUR MOTHER,
WHO CAN YOU TRUST?

IF YOU CAN’T TRUST YOUR
MOTHER, WHO CAN
YOU TRUST?
Soul Murder, Psychoanalysis,
and Creativity
Leonard Shengold
Some of the material in this book was published before in Soul Murder (1989),
Father, Don’t You See I’m Burning (1991), Delusions of Everyday Life (1995), and Soul
Murder Revisited (1999), all published by Yale University Press and reprinted
with kind permission of the publishers. An earlier version of Chapter Six
originally appeared in Is There Life Without Mother? (2000), published by Analytic
Press and reproduced here with kind permission of Taylor & Francis, and a
version of Chapter Two appeared in Halo in the Sky (1988), published by the
Guilford Press and reprinted with kind permission of the publishers.
First published in 2013 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2013 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: 978-1-78049-109-7
Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
I dedicate this book to Margaret, Larry, Laurie, Nina,
David, Jeffrey, Maya, and Marc

CONTENTS
EPIGRAPHS ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND EXPLANATIONS xi
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Kaspar Hauser and soul murder 3
CHAPTER TWO
A note on soul murder 37
CHAPTER THREE
Dickens, Little Dorrit, and soul murder 43
CHAPTER FOUR
Haunted by parents: Samuel Butler 71
vii
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER FIVE
Swinburne—a child who wanted to be beaten 97
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIX
Jules Renard: soul murder in life and literature 121
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kipling, his early life and work—an attempt at soul murder 141
CHAPTER EIGHT
E. M. Forster 185
CHAPTER NINE
Elizabeth Bishop: the moth and the mother 197
CHAPTER TEN
King Lear and the multiple meanings of “nothing” 219
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Clinical example of becoming able to transcend
(but not eliminate) being haunted by parents 231
CHAPTER TWELVE
Child abuse and deprivation: soul murder 235
NOTES 251
REFERENCES 293
INDEX 307
EPIGRAPHS
Indeed, like those plants that bifurcate as they grow, side by side with
the sensitive boy which was all that I had been, there was now a man of
the opposite sort, full of common sense, of severity towards the morbid
sensibility of others, a man resembling what my parents had been to
me. No doubt, as each of us is obliged to continue in himself the life of
his forebears, the balanced, cynical man who did not exist in me at the
start had joined forces with the sensitive one, and it was natural that I
should become in my turn what my parents had been to me. What is
more, at the moment when this new personality took shape in me, he
found his language ready made in the memory of the speeches, ironical
and scolding, that had been addressed to me, that I must now address to
other people, and which came so naturally to my lips, whether I evoked
them by mimicry and association of memories, or because the delicate
and mysterious enchantments of the reproductive power had traced in
me unawares, as upon the leaf of a plant, the same intonations, the same
gestures, the same attitudes as had been adopted by the people from
whom I sprang. For sometimes, as I was playing the wise counselor
in conversation, I seemed to be listening to my grandmother; had it
not, moreover, occurred to my mother (so many unconscious currents
inflected everything in me down to the tiniest movements of my fingers
ix