Haunted by Parents Book

Leonard Shengold takes his title from one of Charles Dickens' stories, "The Haunted Man." Shengold quotes from the story: "My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done. . . . Thus I prey upon myself. Thus memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would." Through case histories, (auto)biographies of famous persons, and literary texts, Shengold explores the effects of patients' excessive attachment to parents whose influence was emotionally detrimental or who left too soon due to death or abandonment. It is by being "haunted by parents," Shengold argues, that we insist that "change is loss" and refuse to make healthy adjustments. [He is speaking about personal development, which is the spirit in which his work must be taken. My one argument with Shengold is that he fails to take into account cultural and political factors. That is, change DOES mean loss if "change" means one's land or job or family or traditions have been forcibly taken away.] As Shengold wisely points out, helping patients to "own" their reluctance to lessen parents' longlasting domination requires much therapeutic repetition of memories, dreams, associations, analytic interpretations, and so forth. Thus, his book itself is therapeutic in that there are carefully linked but somewhat repetitive narratives about fascinatingly "haunted" figures such as Benjamin Spock, William Wordsworth, Leonard Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov, and so on. Also, there is the beautifully repeated motif of the spring garden (womb) that comes to life but dies away so that all that's left is a memory. Such repetition helps one understand the full power of Shengold's argument.