Haunted by Parents - Hardcover

Shengold, Leonard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300116101 ISBN 13: 9780300116106

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Synopsis

East Germany, its economy, and its society were in decline long before the country's political collapse in the late 1980s. The clues were there in the natural landscape, Arvid Nelson argues in this groundbreaking book, but policy analysts were blind to them. Had they noted the record of the leadership's values and goals manifest in the landscape, they wouldn't have hailed East Germany as a Marxist-Leninist success story. Nelson sets East German history within the context of the landscape history of two centuries to underscore how forest and ecosystem change offered a reliable barometer to the health and stability of the political system that governed them.
"Cold War Ecolog"y records how East German leaders' indifference to human rights and their disregard for the landscape affected the rural economy, forests, and population. This lesson from history suggests new ways of thinking about the health of ecosystems and landscapes, Nelson shows, and he proposes assessing the stability of modern political systems based on the environment's system qualities rather than on political leaders' goals and beliefs.

About this title

Review:

"Dr. Shengold intelligently demonstrates how the nature of parental ties shapes one's life course, how difficult it is to alter it, and how it influences creative activities. Anyone who reads this book will experience what I did--quiet hours of reflection on our own upbringing, our own parenting, and how these have shaped our lives."--Samuel Ritvo, M.D., Yale Child Study Center

--Samuel Ritvo

"[A] richly evocative book. . . . This moving book is a pleasure to read; it deepens our emotional knowledge of the 'haunted' patient, and our understanding of the nature of the universal struggle that the need for change presents."--Richard Zimmer, International Journal of Psychoanalysis-- (09/01/2008)

Synopsis:

In this book, the eminent psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold looks at why some people are resistant to change, even when it seems to promise a change for the better. Drawing on a lifetime of clinical experience as well as wide readings of world literature, Shengold shows how early childhood relationships with parents can lead to a powerful conviction that change means loss. Dr. Shengold, who is well known for his work on the lasting affects of childhood trauma and child abuse in such seminal books as "Soul Murder" and "Soul Murder Revisited", continues his exploration into the consequences of early psychological injury and loss. In the examples of his patients and in the lives and work of such figures as Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Wordsworth, and Henrik Ibsen, Shengold looks at the different ways in which unconscious impressions connected with early experiences and fantasies about parents are integrated into individual lives. He shows the difficulties he encounters with his patients in raising these memories to the conscious level where they can be known and owned; and he also shows, in his survey of literary figures, how these memories can become part of the creative process.

"Haunted by Parents" offers a deeply humane reflection on the values and limitations of therapy, on memory and the lingering effects of the past, and on the possibility of recognizing the promise of the future.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0300116101
• ISBN 13: 9780300116106
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272