You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the 1930s and early 1940s Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson made a film called Bathing Babies in Three Cultures. In the film they showed how physical handling and the attitude of the parent toward the child, in the ordinary act of bathing, contributes to the shaping of personality.
Like Mead and Bateson, Leonard Shengold addresses the question of how early body experiences, in the hands and attitude of our parents, shape our minds. Taking a highly sophisticated and thoughtful approach using work with adult analysands, Shengold pays close attention to his patients' childhood recollections of how their parents handled and responded to their growing bodies. He considers this in interplay with the child's developing body ego, current internalized parental imagoes, and the ever present drives. Along with very few others on the contemporary scene (usually those who write on the psychology of women), Shengold privileges the body and the body ego.
In his 1991 Father, Don't You See I'm Burning? Shengold lucidly described how our sexual and aggressive drives create an array of burning needs throughout our childhood and for the rest of our lives. Who we eventually become grows out of our endowments and deficiencies, but also out of the love and care or humiliation and abuse bestowed by our parents on our actual childhood flesh and spirit. How they regarded our physical and wishful selves—with indifference, scorn, abandonment, or overindulgence, or with a loving gaze and tender words—leaves its mark on our very habitus, as well as on our internalized self and other representations. Eventual neutralization of our driven desires (the ability to tolerate gratification that falls short of everything we want) depends on a benevolent and containing physical and emotional interaction with those who care for us.
With the ordinary, expectable conflicts that are a part of development, some body-ego wounding is inevitable. We soon create the character armor we need to protect ourselves. H