The Promise

Leonard Shengold

ABOUT THE AUTHORPREFACEINTRODUCTIONPART I: CLINICAL AND LITERARY STUDIES CHAPTER ONE Promise, change, and trauma CHAPTER TWO On the trauma of seeing mother's genitals CHAPTER THREE Chronic trauma and soul murder: literary and clinical examples CHAPTER FOUR Haunting and parricide CHAPTER FIVE Virginia Woolf haunted CHAPTER SIX Rage as a fact of life (or, Who is in Charge of Time and Space?) CHAPTER SEVEN Killing (or not killing) the king CHAPTER EIGHT Vladimir Nabokov: murderous impulses displaced onto Freud and literary rivals-and sublimated in relation to butterflies and chessPART II: YEARLY REPETITIONS EVOKING THE BOOK'S TITLE CHAPTER NINE The psychological effect of birthdays and anniversaries CHAPTER TEN Jewish holidays: Chanukah, Purim, Passover, Rosh Hashana, and Yom Kippur CHAPTER ELEVEN Christian holidays: Christmas, New Year's Day, Lent, and Easter CHAPTER TWELVE Secular holidays: Thanksgiving, St. Valentine's Day, Memorial Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and the Fourth of July CHAPTER THIRTEEN Holiday from psychoanalysis: as August approachesPART III: THE PROMISE OF EVERYTHING CHAPTER FOURTEEN Being both sexes-addendum: a clinical observation on anal sexuality CHAPTER FIFTEEN Stella-the infant as the centre of the universeREFERENCESINDEX