The Promise: Who is in Charge of Time and Space?

Our sense of identity begins (our psychological birth sometime in the first year of life) with the feeling that we are the centre 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.

Table of Contents:
ABOUT THE AUTHORPREFACEINTRODUCTIONPART I: CLINICAL AND LITERARY STUDIES CHAPTER ONE Promise, change, and trauma CHAPTER TWO On the trauma of seeing mother's genitals CHAPTER THREE Chronic trauma and soul murder: literary and clinical examples CHAPTER FOUR Haunting and parricide CHAPTER FIVE Virginia Woolf haunted CHAPTER SIX Rage as a fact of life (or, Who is in Charge of Time and Space?) CHAPTER SEVEN Killing (or not killing) the king CHAPTER EIGHT Vladimir Nabokov: murderous impulses displaced onto Freud and literary rivals-and sublimated in relation to butterflies and chessPART II: YEARLY REPETITIONS EVOKING THE BOOK'S TITLE CHAPTER NINE The psychological effect of birthdays and anniversaries CHAPTER TEN Jewish holidays: Chanukah, Purim, Passover, Rosh Hashana, and Yom Kippur CHAPTER ELEVEN Christian holidays: Christmas, New Year's Day, Lent, and Easter CHAPTER TWELVE Secular holidays: Thanksgiving, St. Valentine's Day, Memorial Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and the Fourth of July CHAPTER THIRTEEN Holiday from psychoanalysis: as August approachesPART III: THE PROMISE OF EVERYTHING CHAPTER FOURTEEN Being both sexes-addendum: a clinical observation on anal sexuality CHAPTER FIFTEEN Stella-the infant as the centre of the universeREFERENCESINDEX

About the Author :
Dr Leonard Shengold is a training analyst and former Director of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education (affiliated with NYU School of Medicine, where he is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry). He has published eight books including 'Soul Murder' (1989), 'Haunted by Parents' (2006), and over seventy-five papers on clinical, theoretical and applied psychoanalytic topics. He graduated from Columbia College and Downstate New York Medical School, was an officer in both the American and the International Psychoanalytic Associations, and is currently in private practice as a psychiatrist in New York City.

Review :
'We may experience briefly with our mothers in infancy the promise of unchanging bliss being central to the universe and outside of time, and yearn for it thereafter through growth, individuation, maturation, work, and love. It becomes the marker by which we gauge development, traumata, sublimation, and regression. In this marvellous book, Leonard Shengold calls on his decades of psychoanalytic clinical experience and admiration of great literature and opera to trace and exemplify our struggles with change and ongoing conflicts, with our inevitable, tragic arc in life to death. He is a wonderful guide and a wise man.'- Paul Schwaber, Professor of Letters Emeritus, Wesleyan University, Connecticut'Dr Shengold, the master psychoanalyst and litterateur who made "soul murder" a household word in the 1980s, here gives us a gift of another wise treatise on lived relationships. As in Haunted by Parents, we re-visit nursery ghosts, never shying away from inner parental parricide and our inevitable hatreds. A new lens is his experience of ageing, with its renewal of lost promises and reclamations. Great literature joins us to this common humanity. Shengold is a wonderful storyteller - rich clinical tales of patients' anniversaries; the biographical writing of Woolf or Nabokov; cuttings from many gardens like Milton's or Shakespeare's. Climactically, the final chapters confront death and life. An essay on the analyst's classic August break leads to sad thoughts of yielding up his beloved profession; soon followed by a thrilled encounter with a little grandbaby, sweeping to a triumphant close with a joy in a life force that may serve to undo the dread of ultimate dissolution. It is as if the cycle of "the promise" can begin once more.'- Rosemary H. Balsam, MD, FRC Psych (Lond), Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Medical School; Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis; author of Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis