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

Author(s) : Leonard Shengold

Reviews and Endorsements

‘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 littérateur 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