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Biomedical subjects

L Shengold

Publications and source records attributed to L Shengold.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

Further thoughts about "nothing".

Some meanings of "nothing" are delineated according to their acquisition, confluence, and transformation in the course of the child's development of drives, the ego, and object relations. This sketch is illustrated mainly from King Lear.

Child↗
PubMed1985

The effects of child abuse as seen in adults: George Orwell.

The author presents the case of a patient who showed the massive defensive effects seen in people who were abused in childhood. These effects are similar to those described in George Orwell's 1984 and in his autobiographical writings: denial and "doublethink"; masochistic submission to the tormentor; turning of anger against the self and loving "Big Brother"; identifying with the abuser and tormenting others; a burgeoning of anal mechanisms and obsessive phenomena that results in a massive isolation of affects; excessive emotional control alongside outbursts of rage. The interference with memory and emotions compromises identity and humanity. The unforseeable evolution of innate gifts in a child sometimes permits a partial transcendence of these crippling defenses, as Orwell partially transcended what appears to have been the emotional deprivation of his childhood and what he felt to have been the abuse of his schoolboy years.

Child↗
PubMed1985

Defensive anality and anal narcissism.

This paper aims at demonstrating a currently beleaguered assumption: the central importance, the continuing vitality, and the appropriate complexity of Freud's theory of the drives and of his idea of the primacy of the body ego. It is not enough to consider man a thinking machine or a social being; his animal nature must be given a central place in psychology. The paper postulates that 'anal or sphincter defensiveness' is one of the precursors of the repression barrier. Anality has been comparatively neglected in recent psychoanalytic literature, and so has its explorer, Karl Abraham. The paper's thesis is that there is a special defensive importance to anal erogeneity and libido, and to those aspects of ego and superego that are functionally operative (as the 'sadistic-anal organization' (Freud, 1917)) during the so-called 'sadistic-anal' developmental phase. Any of the psychic danger situations can evoke regression to manifestations of 'anal narcissim'--an attempt to master overwhelming feeling by a kind of emotional sphincter action, narrowing down the world to the controllable and the predictable. The basic assumption here is Fliess's idea that the attainment of anal sphincter control functions--with, as-it-were, 'psychic resonance'--as a means to master primal (murderous, cannibalistic) affect. For optimal psychic development, a proper balance must be attained between anal control of, and anal expression of, instinctual derivatives--especially of affect laden with aggression.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

A patient who had trouble with geography.

Aspects of geography are important in relation to the establishment of body ego, since they inevitably supply from the external world the early symbols that represent in the mind the basic elements of infantile experience in regard to body parts, functions, and relationships with primal objects. The accretional inter-twining of all subsequent psychic conflicts can therefore be expressed in symbolic geographic terms. These conflicts center on the developmentally evolving meanings of the mother's body as epitomized in the riddle of the Sphinx. Illustration of the concepts includes a brief clinical report and selected literary and mythological examples.

Ego↗
PubMed1982

The symbol of telephoning.

Two clinical excerpts illustrate the patient's use of telephoning as an equivalent for and a symbol of masturbation. Some of the many and multidetermined latent meanings of telephoning are indicated.

Anxiety↗