© The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2011

Volume LXXX, Number 1

TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE

By Leonard Shengold

The author discusses trauma, particularly in relation to

childhood events, as well as one of its possible sequelae, soul
murder (Shengold 1989, 1999). Negative interactions with
parental figures can have long-term implications for the devel-
oping child, sometimes persisting into adulthood, and yet even
the most loving parents cannot always behave toward the child
in an optimal manner. The profound effect of change on the
human psyche is also discussed, and two clinical vignettes are
presented to illustrate the author’s points.

Keywords: Trauma, soul murder, change, parents, memory, de-

fenses, abuse, omnipotence, childhood.

Trauma is an experience that is felt as too much to bear. Soul murder is

a crime in which the perpetrator is able to destroy the victim’s capacity
for feeling joy and love. Soul murder always implies trauma, but trauma
does not always result in soul murder. Our animal nature involves mur-
derous rage and incestuous desires that need to be controlled. Develop-
mental changes make some degree of trauma inevitable. For the infant,
just feeling the intensity of early rage is traumatic.
Trauma is reacted to in individually different ways and intensities.
The newborn’s initial expectation of grandiose centrality—to be fur-
nished by benevolent, omnipotent parental gods—fades as narcissism
shrinks and the limitations of the human condition begin to register.

Leonard Shengold is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University

School of Medicine.
A shorter version of this paper was presented to candidates in training at the New
York Psychoanalytic Institute on January 25, 2009.

121
122 LEONARD SHENGOLD

Long dependence on parental care makes for lifelong resistance to,

alongside positive wishes for, change and maturation.
In his poem “Among School Children,” William Butler Yeats (1928)
sees himself through the eyes of the children as “a 60-year-old smiling
public man . . . a comfortable kind of old scarecrow” (pp. 249-250).
Well, my readers are not school children, and I am old enough to re-
call that being sixty still meant feeling young. I have realized, as I tra-
verse Shakespeare’s (1600) stages of man—fortunately, not yet to the
last (“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” II, vii, 166)—the
importance of passing on what I have come to know in my long psycho-
analytic career, what most psychoanalytic thinkers may feel they already
know: how central to our minds are changes and transitions, dramati-
cally so at their beginnings and endings. These make for the glories and
the tragedies of our lives. The Rat Man remembered and reported to
Freud his having said to himself after his first intercourse: “This is glorious
[Strachey’s translation for grossartig]! One might murder one’s father for
this!” (Freud 1909, p. 201, italics added)—a novel in two sentences.
My recent writings have been devoted to the continuing but
evolving psychic importance of our earliest relationships with parents,
as our minds proceed through developmental changes that begin with
physical and subsequent psychological birth, changes experienced and
registered emotionally as mixtures of bad and good. My last-published
book, Haunted by Parents (Shengold 2006), derives its title from the met-
aphor of parental ghosts found in Homer’s Odyssey and later referred
to by Freud and Loewald. These godlike, glorious (grossartig) parental
imagoes evolve as the mind develops, but the earliest forms remain and
return in regression. The Homeric ghosts come to life, for better and
for worse, “when they drink blood” (Freud 1900, p. 249)—which means
being evoked by memories and fantasies of traumatic changes of inten-
sities that are the essence of pleasurable, painful, and traumatic (too-
muchness) experience.
Our early parents are felt to have godlike powers, and whatever the
mind registers as happening within and outside the child’s body is ini-
tially and for a long time attributed to them. The terror aroused by trau-
matic intensity is blamed by the infantile mind on the parental gods. The
earliest feelings of need for omnipotent parents are retained as we pro-
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 123
ceed toward death; these push toward consciousness as the dependence
on others burgeons. But there are varieties of deep ambivalence toward
these gods who allow suffering and cannot eliminate death.

SOUL MURDER
My writings on trauma were concentrated in Soul Murder (Shengold
1989), a study of the consequences of child abuse and deprivation. Soul
murder is a term perhaps most famously defined by Henrik Ibsen (1896,
p. 269) as the killing of the joy in life—or of the capacity for love—in an-
other human being.1 It is not a diagnosis, but a crime with a perpetrator
and a victim. The perpetrator may be, or at least can come to play the
role of, a parent; the victim is either a child or as helpless and powerless
as a child. George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) illustrates a twentieth-century
explication of the use of torture to accomplish brainwashing.
Looking back at my books, I feel I have written little that is original,
but much that is important to know—pointing to what “everyone” knows
(or, better, should know). Old age, if one is lucky, can bring wisdom,
alongside the dimming of physical and mental powers. Wisdom, a grasp
of how the world goes and, much harder, how one’s self operates, can
be painful. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil bears bitter and
dangerous fruit. But being cast out of the promised Eden of infancy, and
the resultant diminution of narcissistic promise, marks the beginning of
human life.
King Lear (protagonist of one of Shakespeare’s psychology text-
books for would-be analysts [1608]) finally achieves wisdom when he
experiences misery and learns to love; wisdom is not primarily gained
intellectually but by knowing and owning by way of thought charged with
emotion. A vital part of wisdom is the painful and narcissistically chal-
lenging knowledge of how much we do not know; Freud’s disciple Hanns
Sachs wrote, “Our deepest analyses are no more than scratching the
earth’s surface with a harrow” (quoted in Gitelson 1973, p. 250).

1
Soul murder is a repeated theme in many of Ibsen’s plays—one of which, Hedda
Gabler (1890), illustrates more than one instance of soul murder, with Hedda as both
victim and soul murderer.
124 LEONARD SHENGOLD

Many of my patients have been most resistant to accepting and

owning their individual versions of the inevitable psychic existence and
power of murderous aggression (preoedipal leading to oedipal). When
asking analytic candidates in my classes to define the Oedipus complex,
I have ceased to be surprised at how often the negative oedipal (homo-
sexual) impulses, and especially the parricidal ones, are left out.
Our psychic awareness begins with a conviction of being the center
of the universe, part of mother’s (the primal parent/god’s) body; then
that narcissistic centrality starts to shrink, and shrink, and shrink. (Not
for nothing are would-be healers of the psyche called shrinks.) The
nursery becomes the universe and the earliest parental figures its gods,
and we must learn enough about the realities of the world inside our
bodies and the world outside our bodies to deal with the burden and the
blessing of being human—in accordance with the realistic conditions
and limitations of life. The intensity of sensations and emotions must be-
come manageable. Rage, always in precarious control, must be tolerated,
both as turned inward and outward.
Infantile intensities—even if generally “tamed” with maturation—
are revivable in reaction to subsequent trauma and loss. As we mature,
traumata inevitably continue, and so, to varying extents, we can all feel
we have been victims of soul murder. To counter this, good parenting
is all-important but never enough. Some individuals are born with de-
ficiencies that cannot be made up for, and eventually, for everyone—
even those who lead a long and happy life—there is a tragic ending.
Sophocles’s (5th century b.c.) chorus says, after Oedipus (“Our King, our
father”) blinds himself, “Call no man fortunate that is not dead. The
dead are free from pain” (p. 382).
Trauma’s essence is overstimulation—which is reciprocally related
to understimulation and deprivation, since understimulation evokes re-
active catastrophic emotional intensities: mixed rage, terror, and in-
tense need—a circling back to overstimulation. Neglect (e.g., having no
parent) is worse than having a bad parent: cf. Spitz’s (1945) work with
institutionalized orphans who were seldom picked up and were bottle-
fed without being held; many just died. Both abuse and deprivation lead
to trauma. But trauma does not always lead to soul murder.
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 125
Trauma is a matter of having to bear the unbearable, alone, forsaken
by parents and God. Traumatic intensity can assault the mind both from
within one’s body and as a reaction to what goes on outside it. Experi-
encing trauma, acute and chronic, is an inevitable part of the human
condition due to the long years of vulnerable dependency on parents
and parental figures in a world full of challenges and dangers—in an
infinite universe not designed for us. Our slow development is in sharp
contrast to the comparatively quick maturation and independence of
other animals. The newborn foal, for example, can quickly get up and
walk away from its mother.
I will start and finish the remainder of this paper with examples of
chronic traumata.

FIRST CLINICAL ILLUSTRATION

L, a successful, married businessman, came to analysis because of
chronic depression, interspersed with temper tantrums directed mainly
at his wife and children. L felt unable to enjoy anything. If I were free to
give more details about him, I might write a paper titled “Soul Murder
among the Very Rich.”
L recounted an “unforgettable, repetitive event” from his childhood.
At five, he had just been permitted to eat at the family table instead
of being fed in the nursery by his beloved (but soon-to-be-dismissed)
nanny. His father (L called him “a Jewish Nazi”), the Kommandant of this
family concentration camp, entered the dining room where the family
was seated, awaiting him. Beside each plate was a banana, the dessert.
The father made a complete round of the table, stopping at every chair
to reach for and squeeze to a pulp every banana except his own.
The cowed older children, used to such happenings, said nothing.
But the five-year-old, frightened and desolate without his nanny, began
to cry when he saw the mangled banana at his plate. Father then turned
on him viciously, shouting, “Stop crying! How dare you make such a fuss
about a banana?”
L, confused and terrified, could not help thinking, “Maybe Father is
right. Should I have made such a fuss about a banana?”
126 LEONARD SHENGOLD

Thus, in his narrative, L recollected the start of his eventually char-

acteristic masochistic submission, his identification with the aggressor,
his status as a victim of brainwashing, and his castration anxiety.2 The
child feels guilty for what the parent does—guilt that this father seemed
not to feel. This taking over of guilt for the sins of the parent is an in-
stance of what I have called the crime of soul murder. Remember that
a five-year-old’s rage against his parent is murderous and terrifying; for
the most part, the anger must be turned against the self since the child
cannot survive without a parent.
Clinically important for empathic understanding: remember that
young children expect that their intense (cannibalistic) anger can magi-
cally kill both the self and the parents, which makes just feeling in itself
a trauma.

NATURE AND NURTURE

We do not know enough about the predeterminants of mental attributes
and potentials with which we are born. Our animal nature ensures that
we start out with inherent patterns of instinctual drives and physical and
mental development and maturation—patterns that are also greatly in-
fluenced by our environment. The most important environmental in-
fluence is that supplied by the care and/or neglect that comes from
early mothering. The womb and then the primal family setting provide
a Garden of Eden from which we must be expelled in order to become
human.

TRAUMA
Psychic trauma cannot be defined or understood by way of reduction to
what has actually happened to the child (or adult). It is the mind’s response
to what has happened that determines the overwhelming emotions and
the deadening defenses against them that constitute the traumatic expe-
rience and its subsequent influence.
I once heard Anna Freud describe (when discussing a case) the acute
trauma of a five-year-old boy who was present in his living room at home

2
A banana is not always just a banana.
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 127
when two men burst in and shot and killed his father. The boy remem-
bered a sudden change from order to violent chaos, and some dim real-
ization that something terrible had been done to his father. Of course,
the boy’s subsequent lack of a father ultimately had profound long-term
effects. But what burned in the grown-up child’s memory as described in
his analysis was not so much what had happened to his father—but that
his mother had then collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital. He
felt abandoned by her. That was what he remembered feeling he could
not stand, understand, or forgive. How could she have allowed all this
to happen in the first place—and then how could she have abandoned
him? (We must each learn, hopefully gradually, the initially unacceptable
lesson that there can be life without mother, the primal parent figure
who starts out as the omnipotent ruler of the universe.) The boy, natu-
rally, enough subsequently did his best to repress his rage toward his
only remaining parent, without whom he appropriately felt he could not
continue to exist.
This anecdote also features something inherent to acute trauma:
suddenness—an instantaneous change from control and the expected
to helplessness and the unbearable. Here change is easily equated with
loss: it is our human neurotic burden to potentially react negatively
to change—even, paradoxically, to change for the better. Too-sudden
change gives one no time to prepare.
One unexpected, illogical but most important Freudian discovery
is the universal existence of a compulsion to repeat traumatic events.
This unconscious force was noted by psychiatrists in World War I, who
studied combat casualties haunted in their dreams and waking life by
the reliving of traumata experienced on the battlefield. How could one
explain this clinging to what had been so horrible? The compulsion to
repeat trauma exists “beyond the pleasure principle” (Freud 1920)—
part of the mystery of our individually different burdens of human mas-
ochism—turning anger against the self by way of need for punishment,
failure, and hurt.
Traumatic reaction involves, to use Frank’s (1969) terms, the unre-
memberable (what happened before one was old enough for events to reg-
ister or in an altered state of consciousness) and the unforgettable (what
occurred when something happened that proved impossible to forget).
128 LEONARD SHENGOLD

There is mystery about precisely when events begin to be retained by

the infant in a form that gives access to consciousness and conscious
memory.

MEMORY AND OWNING

It is useful to sample one’s memories to gauge how much emotional con-
viction one has about what could seem to amount to past trauma; can we
own the traumatic feelings that should accompany the “facts”? Owning im-
plies being able to bear the flow of associated emotions to the memory
that are required to retain the conviction that it really happened.3
A personal example: When growing up, I would often think of my
father’s death, which occurred when I was a child. But my memory of
the circumstances was defective. When my father died, I blanked out
my emotions. What I remembered, as with the patient Anna Freud de-
scribed, was that my mother had paid so little attention to me. My father
was an old man of fifty. Why was she always weeping?
Decades later, in the course of my analysis, I did my own weeping
for him in belated mourning. His death was an overwhelming event—a
tragic loss that changed my life in so many ways. Yet I had dealt with it
at the time with a primitive psychic defense: denial—i.e., I treated it as if
it had not occurred. The feeling of loss, the clash of love and hatred of
my oedipal rival—above all, guilt—had been too much to bear in con-
sciousness.

EARLY PSYCHIC DEFENSES

A range of the early, primal defenses we call denial 4 was present for many
people during or following the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
Denial was more easily evoked both in those who were geographically

3
Conviction is not enough in itself. False conviction exists, and one should work to
identify it and give it up.
4
As psychoanalysts, we should know that our defenses are metaphors and can never
be exactly defined, although their effect can be described. What we call denial can also
be seen as involving elements of what has been variously described and then labeled as
emotional isolation, repression, dissociation, splitting, and shifts of consciousness. Ours is not an
exact science.
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 129
or emotionally too distant from the sites of the tragedies, and in some
people (many of these already emotionally disturbed and vulnerable)
who were geographically and/or emotionally too close. Currently, most
of us who do not have family or friends directly involved read sickening
daily headlines about, and even see on television, the deaths and ex-
ternal tragic events taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza with an
emotional involvement that is less deep than the immediate impact we
felt with the sudden dramatic events of 9/11, that terrible day watched by
so many Americans on television. Superficially, by now, we have become
used to the daily Iraq and Afghanistan horrors. But our earliest traumata
still lurk in our unconscious minds, and regression to them and their
consequences can cause our psychic ghosts “to drink blood.”
In later life, our early intense, traumatic emotions and the massive
damaging defenses against them (varieties of denial that can range from
“It doesn’t matter” to “It’s too awful, it can’t be so!”) can erupt into our
consciousness. I have called these “Concentration Camp Defenses”5 (see
Shengold 1999, chapter 6). (Inevitably, except in emergencies, such de-
nial/defenses are maladaptive outside the world’s or the family’s con-
centration camps, since they lead to breaking with reality.) You cannot
use your will to fight what you must not know; you cannot own what does
not count or what is not there. Even minor events can revive earlier
traumata—the “too-muchnesses” that can come to life to haunt us after
childhood, if past realities have been denied.
I am not an expert on reactions to external disasters that are symbol-
ized by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. My patients who were or
felt they were abused and/or neglected as children have mainly mani-
fested psychic responses to losses, seductions, beatings, cruelties, and
deprivations, most often that took place within a family setting, in the
course of a child’s development that at first glance did not seem cata-
strophic. Fantasies of having been abused are common; it is sometimes
very difficult to be sure if the stories or conjectures the therapist is told
are based on actual past realities. The therapist should suspend both belief
and disbelief in what the patient feels has, or may have, happened, and
5
The poet/critic Randall Jarrell (1962), in a paper on Kipling, called the house in
England that little Rudyard was left in by his parents for years while they returned to India
“one of God’s concentration camps” (p. 146).
130 LEONARD SHENGOLD

wait to see what follows in the “subsequent . . . course of events” (Freud

1896) of the therapy, when and if the patient allows the dependent con-
ditions from childhood to come to emotional life again in relation to
the therapist.
Lionel Trilling (1950) wrote that Freud taught us to see the mind as
a poetry-making organ, and I would like to quote some relevant poetry
here. William Blake (1794) describes his fantasy version of the trauma
of birth:

My mother groan’d, my father wept,

Into the dangerous world I leapt;6
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in the cloud,
Struggling in my father’s hands,
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast. [p. 599]

Blake’s younger contemporary, Wordsworth (1807), describes the

opposite of trauma at our beginning, and his metaphor brings in heaven
alongside hell:

Trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God,7 who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
But, adds Wordsworth:
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy. [p. 588]

Thus begins the inevitable diminution of the promise of heaven and

eternal life. Our centrality in the universe, our inborn narcissism, begins
its shrinkage.
Another poet, Milton (1667), in Paradise Lost, shows us that human
life begins with the primal curse of the expulsion from the Garden of

6
The verb leapt connotes the suddenness of change that is implicit in trauma.
7
God here, psychologically speaking, is the primal parent, the original omnipotent
one, an omniscient, bisexual, mothering figure.
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 131
Eden for eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge. For sentient beings,
getting to know the human condition—involving sex and reproduction,
incest, murder, and death—begins and intermittently continues, but re-
luctantly so, in the wake of great resistance and denial.
Trauma, too-muchness, stems developmentally from frustrations im-
posed by the inevitable failings of even the best and most loving parents,
who must issue and enforce “NO!”s in order to teach children the dan-
gers imposed by the realistic conditions of life. To repeat, trauma is in-
herent to the body of the child from birth on and to the subsequent de-
velopment and maturation of an individual’s mind and separate identity
in the family matrix. I stress the mysteries of the unpredictable variations
in how much is too much for each individual—and of the differences in
reactions to pathogenic factors like traumata.
We psychic therapists are specialists in pathology. We know too little
about the comparatively unexplored mystery of psychic health—espe-
cially of inborn strengths and talents, some of which can be strength-
ened in some people by their ability to react with transcendent adap-
tation to traumatic conditions, and even to inadequate parenting; this
health can exist alongside damage and scarring.

PARENTS AS GODS
In the beginning, when our emerging self is the center of the universe,
the mother and later the father are our gods—gods who inexorably
evoke hatred both in relation to their own human failings and, more
fundamentally, because they turn out not to be able to take us beyond
our human limitations; they cannot eliminate our mortality. Any threat
to, or revelation of the lack of, their omnipotence can be traumatic for
the child, and the inevitable disappointment and rage toward the parent
(rage stemming both from frustrations by parents and from inborn ag-
gression) make trauma, loss, and our eventual fate—death—parts of the
human condition that we cannot bear to think about for long, and yet
must be enough aware of in order to survive.
Traumatic anxiety is the basic psychic danger situation. The intensi-
ties of both the infantile heaven that promises eternal life and eternal di-
vine parental protection—a promise that the conditions of life force us to
132 LEONARD SHENGOLD

try to renounce—and the hell of our own emotional vulnerabilities and

inadequacies must be lived through and made tolerable, at least most of
the time, in order for us to be able to survive and mature. The promise of
magical rescue from danger and death by omnipotent and benevolent
parents (a rescue that for the young child is felt with delusional inten-
sity as a promise8—it is assumed—that will and must be fulfilled) never
completely disappears and can be revived fully in regression brought on
by trauma and loss in later life. It is a great blow to our narcissism to
realize that conflict, anxiety, depression, and other psychic pathology (at
least neurosis if not some admixture of psychosis) is present in everyone.
(This is easy to see in others, and especially so for therapists in their pa-
tients; it is not so easy to accept that it is true of one’s self as well.)
Children need the feeling that parents care about them, accept what
they are like, and want them there, but even the best of parents can
supply these reactions to the child only intermittently; the inevitable and
necessary separation from the parents who cannot always be there, and
who cannot always supply rescue and should often not fulfill some wishes
even if they can, has to become tolerable.9 (It is sad to realize, if we are
honest with ourselves, how much of our daily lives is spent on narcis-
sistic, selfish concerns; loving, thinking of, and caring for others continu-
ously is not part of human nature.)
It is reassuring to remember that, if we are lucky enough and
strong enough to begin with, trauma can help toughen us and make us
stronger, and that insight, the sometimes painful ability to observe and
accept what is wrong in ourselves and in our needed and valued others,
can further transcendent healing.

CONFLICTS OVER SEXUAL

IMPULSES AND ACTIONS
Victims of chronic, overt soul murder are left with a continuing burden
of murderous rage. There are all kinds of variations of this, but there

8
Note how often I use the word promise.
9
I want to point out the psychological danger of overindulgent parents who are
so afraid of their own aggression that they cannot say “no,” causing the child to become
terrified of his own anger and to be unable to say “no” to himself; in this sense, “spoiling”
can also cause soul murder.
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 133
are bound to be special difficulties with the ability to love, since trau-
matic expectations follow from emotional openness in those who have
been abused and deprived. Sexuality tends to be predominantly sado-
masochistic, in a myriad of individually diverse mixtures. Joy, pleasure,
and caring for another in sex tends to be overwhelmed by a predomi-
nant admixture of hostility and guilt. Sex can be contaminated by being
equated with murdering and being murdered.
I end with a clinical example of chronic trauma in a family setting
that involves Christmas. It is dramatic enough, even without featuring
catastrophe, violent sexual abuse, or physical torment. And it involves a
delusional holding onto of parents by preserving the promise that the bad
past will be reversed, the giving up of which brings out fierce resistance
to change—even, to repeat, to change for the better.

SECOND CLINICAL ILLUSTRATION

Like the subject of my first illustration, Z came from a very rich, privi-
leged family and was brought up on a luxurious estate that included a
stable of thoroughbred horses. Since Z’s parents were always busy and
frequently away, he was mainly cared for by one of the many servants;
unfortunately, these nannies were frequently changed according to his
mother’s insistent whims of iron. Z’s feelings were ignored. He felt that
both parents cared more about their horses than about him and his
younger brothers. He was “miserably unhappy.” There was “a terrible
emotional deadness” in an atmosphere lacking empathy and loving care.
Z had been a predominantly “good” child, usually compliant or even
submissive toward his parents and authority figures. However, with ser-
vants and other underlings like his siblings and with many of his more
passive schoolmates, he was given to occasional cruelties and tantrums. Z
was generally disliked. His mostly suppressed but murderous anger was
characteristically turned inward, evidenced by his depression, low self-
esteem, and need to provoke failure and punishment. He had no real
friends. There was one male horse trainer in his childhood whom he
idealized and who he felt cared about him, but this man was dismissed
when Z was in his early teens.
Z had a series of memories involving Christmas during his prepu-
bescent years, before his parents divorced. These memories exemplified
134 LEONARD SHENGOLD

the recurrent, agonizingly cruel combination of overwhelming promise

followed by overwhelming frustration that was to become part of a life
pattern. Every year in December, a huge evergreen tree was beautifully
decorated (by the servants), and on Christmas Eve presents were piled
beneath it, but the children were not allowed a close look at them. The
house was full of guests. The next morning, there was an impressive
ritual of opening the presents. On Christmas Day, the boys were per-
mitted to play with the many expensive toys they had received. But the
next morning, Z had to help his father repack the toys in their boxes;
they were to be given away, every one, to the “poor children.” “You have
too many toys anyway,” the father would say to his own “poor children.”
How Z hated all those other poor children! Of course he hated them
instead of hating his father. They were nasty vermin, like his younger
brothers. Z usually remembered the past as if he were an only child, so
great was the hatred displaced from his parents onto his siblings.10 No
cooperation or community of feeling as fellow victims seemed to be pos-
sible for these brothers in the face of their mutual and malignant envy.
Christmas left the boy feeling evil, guilty, and depressed. His father
must be good; he was doing Christ’s work by giving to the poor. Z’s rage
was unbearable—he felt and feared it could kill his father, and the need
to repress it and be left with at least a potentially good and caring fa-
ther in his mind was imperative; this need made for Z’s becoming brain-
washed. The cruelty of receiving gifts that were then taken away was de-
nied. Z identified with the aggressor. (In Orwellian [1948] terms, he had
to “love Big Brother.”)
Z’s conscience came to resemble that of his father: full of a righ-
teous, inhuman lack of empathy—hate directed at others, and, most
damaging, at himself as well. Z felt he was unworthy, and he accepted
as right his father’s professed charitable and character-building motives.
He idealized his tormentor and suppressed the torment. But beneath
this, there smoldered murderous hatred.
As each Christmas approached, the child would remember what had
happened to last year’s presents, but the insistent hope that this time
things would be different would return; he called this “THE PROMISE”
10
Cf. Cain and Abel, the first murder: fratricide as a displacement from parricide.
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 135
(the phrase that had near-delusional force for him—pronounced, as it
were, in capital letters). The traumatic cycle was repeated year after year.
And I am describing only one of many similar sequences. Z needed not
to feel the depth of both his hope and his rage; indeed, he had been
effectively deprived of most of his conscious emotions, compromising
both his memory and his sense of identity. He became for the most part
his parents’ creature, The Good Boy, a pseudo-identity marked by me-
chanical dutifulness and a joyless, loveless existence.
The brainwashing—involving denial, isolation of his emotions, and
subtle, trancelike states—became an almost continuous internalized
process, and this made for a chronic soul-less facade. He called himself
an “as-if” person and a “well-functioning zombie.” Beneath the facade
lurked murderous and suicidal impulses.
Z felt he had gotten through his childhood because he insistently
needed to feel that tomorrow or the next day, the terrible feelings to-
ward his parents that could erupt transiently into consciousness—feel-
ings of hurt and rage about their absences and disapproval (mother,
mostly indifferent; father, frighteningly sadistic and angry)—would sud-
denly change and be transfigured into love. (This was the essence of
“THE PROMISE” of magical transformation that he had so much resis-
tance to giving up—even as an adult in analysis.) And he expected me to
make good on the promise.

MAGIC PROMISE
It is the presence of the resistance to giving up the promise that one’s
parents and past will change that explained for me so many of my then-
current patients’ paradoxical reactions to the day of President Obama’s
inauguration in 2009. Watching it on television, they had rejoiced with
tears of joy for what seemed so much positive promise of change. Change
was a word that had resounded again and again in Obama’s campaign.
For a number of these patients, the initial feeling of promise had
faded by the time they came to the next session with their analyst, their
current emotional parent. They seemed angry with me (I seemed to be,
without their awareness of it, the godlike parent who had allowed the
sad loss of euphoria to occur), but such anger was, characteristically for
136 LEONARD SHENGOLD

these patients, predominantly turned inward. (With a few, I had specu-

latively commented on their not mentioning, or not connecting what
they were saying with, the inauguration.) I was struck by how much the
initial positive reaction, the intense good feeling that now they had been
deprived of, resulted in depression and a need for punishment the next
day.
“Send me to a mental hospital,” one such patient said, before—and
not consciously connected with—reporting his happiness when watching
the ceremony the day before. He was someone who had to fight against
being wrecked by success, as Freud expressed it (1916, p. 328). He had had
in childhood a reaction to the Christmas/New Year holiday sequence
that resembled my patient Z’s.
Z’s psychoanalysis did achieve a breakthrough that entailed enough
renunciation of false promises to allow him sufficient owning of his feel-
ings to know more about what both he and his parents had been like. On
his birthday, just after he had told his parents that he had begun a psy-
choanalysis, his mother sent him as a birthday present one of his father’s
favorite pistols. Z felt—and I think he might well have been right—that
this parental gift, so chilling for him, was an unconscious directive for
him to shoot himself (cf. Hedda Gabler’s suicide by shooting herself with
one of her father’s pistols [Ibsen 1890]).
The consequent modifications in Z’s personality due to his treat-
ment, including the realization and control of his need to be cruel to
his children as his father had been, made for considerable restoration of
his ability to love and to enjoy. Still, I know from subsequent correspon-
dence that the old troubles could sometimes return, though now more
transiently and with less power; they could be felt rather than voiced or
enacted.
Alas, for us all, the potential for feeling too-muchness can disappear
only after death. For old age and the approach to death, we need to be
able to accept the inevitability of our tragic fate with what Wordsworth
calls the philosophic mind. That is, we must have sufficient ability to care
about others and therefore about ourselves—and with enough luck, that
may be possible. Our inherent susceptibility to trauma, our human fail-
ings, make for an inevitably tragic view of life, despite its real joys and
precious worth.
 TRAUMA, SOUL MURDER, AND CHANGE 137

AN INEVITABLE PSYCHIC TRAP

In Haunted by Parents (Shengold 2006), I emphasized the existence of
everyone’s individual version of the psychic trap that is part of the devel-
oping infant’s reality, retained in our minds as a double bind—a double
bind that comes to life with our innate or at least reactive murderous
rage toward those on whom we feel dependent: “I want to get rid of you,
but I can’t live without you!!”
In this sense, considering our continuing dependence on others, no
matter how much we learn to live independently, we are all, in indi-
vidually different ways and to varying extents, Haunted by Parents. That
haunting is renewed and enhanced with the regression that follows
trauma and loss. Yes, we are all haunted by parents; but fortunately there
are good ghosts as well as bad ones, and hauntings for the good as well
as hauntings for the bad (although I have not in this paper emphasized
the good).

REPETITIONS
Finally, two clinically important implications to remember: (1) For every
infant, just feeling rage toward a parent is a trauma; and (2) The persis-
tence of the infantile need for magical transformation and rescue by the
parent is the source of great resistance that needs to be recognized and
come to terms with in the course of analytic treatment.

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