"Father, don't you see I'm burning?" Book

This book from Dr Leonard Shengold presents a psychoanalytic view of the human life cycle, from the infant's narcissistic feeling of being everything to the final nothing at the end of life. Father, don't you see I'm burning? - a quote from a dream discussed by Freud - is used in a variety of contexts throughout the book to refer to the instinctual drives and bodily sensations that make up the infant's inner world. In symbolic form, these urges continue to dominate our psychic life, causing us to burn with desire, ambition, rage, and even the wish to murder our parents-in-the-mind for frustrating our insinctual demands. Ultimately we have to learn to settle for less and less than the everything we continue to desire. But, as nothing approaches, some of us develop a new sense of the preciousness of life and of other human beings. Others experience a resurgence of infantile need. Dr Shengold's reflections on sex, narcissism, symbolism, and murder are illustrated with clinical and literary examples, from King Lear, personification of infantile demandingness, to Ibsen's Master Builder, the soul-murderer par-excellence.