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As I read “My Dungeon Shook,” my thoughts went to Hans Loewald and his beautiful description of a parental function in which the parent, holding a version of the core that the child presents to him, mediates a vision of growth and future. In “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” Loewald writes:
The parent ideally is in an empathic relationship of understanding the child's particular stage of development, yet ahead in his vision of the child's future and mediating this vision to the child in his dealing with him. This vision, informed by the parents own experience and knowledge of growth and future is ideally a more articulate and more integrated version of the core of being that the child presents to the parent. The more that the parent sees and knows, he mediates to the child, so that the child in identification with it, can grow. The child, by internalizing aspects of the parent, also internalizes the parents' image of the child—an image that is mediated to the child in the thousand different ways of being handled bodily and emotionally. (1960, pg. 20)
Hold that image next to the painful dilemma described by Baldwin in The Fire Next Time:
Every effort made by the child's elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him, causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be “good” not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind
Page 295their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into his consciousness through his parents' tone of voice, as he is being exhorted, punished or loved; in the sudden uncontrollable note of fear in his mother's or his father's voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary. (, p. 40)
I thought about “the talk,” a responsibility left to black parents to caution their children about police, to prepare them f