NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times
February 10, 2020
By Richard Sandomir
He said mistreating and neglecting children amounted to “soul murder” — a deliberate attempt to crush or eradicate the personality of a vulnerable young person.
Dr. Leonard Shengold, an esteemed psychoanalyst who in two books vividly described the terrifying impact of long-term abuse and neglect of children as “soul murder,” died on Jan. 16 at his home in Stone Ridge, N.Y. He was 94.
His son David said the cause was complications of leukemia.
During 60 years of psychoanalytic practice, Dr. Shengold observed the damage childhood abuse had wreaked on numerous adult patients. (He also treated patients outside that category, including the renowned writer and neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks.)
He described “soul murder” as a crime committed by psychotic or psychopathic parents and other adults through sexual abuse, emotional deprivation and physical or mental torture. He equated this mistreatment with the “deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person,” as he wrote in “Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation” (1989).
Dr. Shengold had been treating adult victims of childhood abuse for about 25 years when he wrote “Soul Murder.” The term that gave the book its title was coined in the 19th century and later found its place in a noted case history of Freud’s based on the memoirs of a mentally ill judge.
Dr. Shengold drew on decades of clinical cases and the literary works of writers like Kipling, Chekhov and Dickens, all of whom, he wrote, suffered neglect or abuse in childhood. Helpless children, he believed, are easily victimized by their tormentors because of their physical and emotional dependence on them. And their reliance on them inevitably compels many to seek solace from the abusers themselves.
“The most destructive effect of child abuse is perhaps the need to hold on to the abusing parent or parent figure by identifying with the abuser,” he wrote. “This becomes part of a compulsion to repeat the experiences of abuse — as tormentor (enhancing sadism) and simultaneously as victim (enhancing masochism).”
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