Father, Don't You See I'm Burning? by Leonard Shengold

Father, Don't You See I'm Burning? by Leonard Shengold

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Summary

A psychoanalytic view of the human life cycle from the infant's feeling of being everything, to the final "nothing" at the end of life. The title refers to the instinctual drives that make up the infant's inner world and which, in symbolic form, continue to dominate our psychic life.

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Father, Don't You See I'm Burning? by Leonard Shengold

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.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780300050042
ISBN 10 0300050046
Title Father, Don't You See I'm Burning?
Author Leonard Shengold
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Yale University Press
Year published 1991-05-22
Number of pages 184
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.