Between cure and literature: An interview with Leonard Shengold

Abstract

This paper is an interview with Leonard Shengold, training psychoanalyst at the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University Medical School, renowned for his work on the importance of early parenting as a source of health and pathology, and on the lasting effects of childhood trauma and abuse. He has written extensively about his experience with abused patients, most notably in Soul murder: The effects of childhood abuse and deprivation (1989) and, more recently, in Haunted by parents (2006), whose style combines clinical observations with reflections on literature to explore the topography and the treatment of the abused self. Dr. Shengold is both a highly regarded scholar and a keen clinician with a marked literary flare. Creative and productive since the very beginning of his career, he has also advanced psychoanalysis through his stimulating participation in analytic organizations, having served as Secretary of the Board of Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), as Director of The Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University, and as Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He won The Mary S. Sigourney Award in 1997 for his distinguished contributions to the field of psychoanalysis.

Keywords:

• Leonard Shengold
• Soul murder: The effects of childhood abuse and deprivation
• childhood trauma
• early parenting
• author's history

Notes

^*The occasion for this interview was the forthcoming publication by Centro Scientifico Editore of the first Italian translation, edited by Franco Borgogno, of Leonard Shengold's classic Soul murder: Childhood abuse and deprivation. The present paper actually consists of an integration of two interviews: the first conducted by the authors of this work, the second run by Dr. Sarah Lusk, which took place in December 2009 (printed in the Newsletter of PINE, the Psychoanalytic Institute and Society of New England, East, in 2010; Lusk, 2010). We thank Leonard Shengold for encouraging us to excerpt profusely from Lusk's oral interview and for approving this final version of the work.

¹It was later clarified that the present interview was going to be published in English.

²Dr. Shengold is referring here to the forthcoming publication of the first Italian translation, edited by Franco Borgogno, of his classic Soul Murder: [Q1] Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, and to the invitation to present his book at the School of Specialization in Clinical Psychology of the University of Turin, which he has just received from the Director of the school, Professor Antonella Granieri.