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When I first read the title of Leonard Shengold's newest book, I was puzzled. Has he become an expert on religion and physics? No, he hasn't. Rather, he has written an engrossing and poetic compendium of thoughts and experiences from his own life and his psychoanalytic practice. These musings elaborate the meanings and consequences of a universal issue all humans face: The belief, and deep hope, that our parents are omniscient and can protect us from disappointment, pain, and loss, as well as the end of the human life cycle. the Promise does not come true. We all die, while time and space move on.
Shengold explores how we deal with the multiple realities of time and space. Much of this material comes from incidents in his psychoanalytic practice, but he extends the field with a range of sensitive explorations in literature, music, biography, and everyday life, including his own. He gives us many rich and imaginative examples of our struggles, as humans and as patients, to hold onto omnipotence and to come to terms with failure. the issue of our dependence on parental omnipotence takes on a particularly poignant meaning when Shengold reveals to the reader that his own father died when he was a young child (p. 7). This must certainly have been a traumatic blow to his fantasy of parental omnipotence.
One of the most intriguing literary examples in this book, dealing with the desperation engendered by parental failure, is Shengold's chapter on Virginia Woolf and her struggles to hold on to her sanity in the face of the crushing loss of her loving mother, her father's totally narcissistic preoccupations, and repeated incestuous assaults from her two older stepbrothers. Her family life is crowded with sibs and half-sibs, many of them exploitative and cruelly unreliable. Shengold focuses particularly on Woolf's last novel, To the