Soul Murder Revisited


Book Description

Annotation A decade after the publication of his highly acclaimed book Soul Murder, Dr. Leonard Shengold reflects anew on the circumstances and the consequences of willful abuse and neglect of children. With compelling examples from literature and from clinical cases, Dr. Shengold describes techniques of adaptation and denial by victims, the psychopathology of soul murder, and therapy techniques for restoring the capacity to love.




Soul Murder


Book Description

To abuse or neglect a child, to deprive the child of his or her own identity and ability to experience joy in life, is to commit soul murder. Soul murder is the perpetration of brutal or subtle acts against children that result in their emotional bondage to the abuser and, finally, in their psychic and spiritual annihilation. In this compelling, disturbing, and superbly readable book, Dr. Leonard Shengold, clinical professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, explores the devastating psychological effects of this trauma inflicted on a shocking number of children. Drawing on a lifetime of clinical experience and wide-ranging reading in world literature, Dr. Shengold examines the ravages of soul murder in the adult lives of his patients as well as in the lives and works of such seminal writers as George Orwell, Dickens, Chekhov, and Kipling. One hopeful note in this saga of pain is that a terrible childhood can, if survived, be a source of strength, as Dr. Shengold finds in the cases of Dickens and Orwell. Provocatively original in its approach to literature and psychology, unsettling in its vivid portrayal of the darker side of human nature, far-reaching in its conclusions, Soul Murder will stand alongside such works as Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child as one of the most important studies of the psyche to appear in decades.




Haunted by Parents


Book Description

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, China is poised to become a major global power. And though much has been written of China's rise, a crucial aspect of this transformation has gone largely unnoticed: the way that China is using soft power to appeal to its neighbours and to distant countries alike. This original book is the first to examine the significance of China's recent focus on soft power, that is, diplomacy, trade incentives, cultural and educational exchange opportunities, and other techniques, to project a benign national image, pose as a model of social and economic success, and develop stronger international alliances. Drawing on years of experience tracking China's policies in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, Joshua Kurlantzick reveals how China has wooed the world with a charm offensive that has largely escaped the attention of American policymakers. Beijing's new diplomacy has altered the political landscape in Southeast Asia and far beyond, changing the dynamics of China's relationships with other countries. China also has worked to take advantage of American policy mistakes, the author contends. In a provocative conclusion, he considers a future in which China may be the first nation since the Soviet Union to rival the U.S. in international influence.




Killer on the Road


Book Description

Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time. Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence. Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.




Dear Creature


Book Description

A monstrous love ballad Deep beneath the waves Grue discovers love after finding Shakespeare’s plays in cola bottles. When his first attempt at companionship in the world above ends . . . poorly, Grue searches for the person who cast the plays into the sea. What he finds is love in the arms of Giuliettabut with his wicked past catching up to him, Grue must decide if becoming a new man means ignoring the monster he was. * Brand-new hardcover edition of Jonathan Case’s debut graphic novel!




Pornography and Genocide


Book Description

One out of every thirty five women born is killed for cultural or sexual reasons. In the twentieth century more women were killed for those reasons than all the people who died in wars. Women everywhere live in the higher stages of Gregory Stanton’s eight stage genocide scale. Pornography contributes to the peril, whether in the form of battlefield rape films, the rape chants of frat boys, or the massive distribution of violent images on the web and through other media. The United Nations definition of genocide must be changed to recognize women as a targeted group. Pornography and Genocide pulls together the evidence from legal scholars and a myriad of contemporary studies and news accounts from around the world. It is time to face the war against women.




Haunted


Book Description

The disturbing experience of psychological infanticide reflects the darkest aspect of the wounding of the Sacred Feminine - the Death Mother archetype that annihilates rather than nurtures life. Through myth, story, classic literature, biography, poems, art and dreams, Dr. Violet Sherwood weaves together symbolic aspects of psychological infanticide with psychoanalytic theory of traumatic attachment and the literal truth of a centuries-old history of infanticide. She illuminates the Death Mother archetype in the dynamic between the unwilling (or unsupported) mother and the unwelcome child. Her personal and archetypal journey into, through, and beyond the underworld, offers hope and guidance for the restoration of the relationship between the Sacred Feminine and the Divine Child. She draws on her professional experience as a psychotherapist and her lived experience of psychological infanticide as a result of closed stranger adoption to explore the intimate connection between life and death, revealing the life task of the infanticided psyche is to embrace death and discover the life that lies beyond the realm of the underworld.




Affect Intolerance in Patient and Analyst


Book Description

Coen (training and supervising analyst, Columbia U. Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research) offers advice to psychoanalysts working with extremely difficult patients. His central premise is that both patients and therapists have difficulty tolerating intense affects (such as loving and hating) and that the clinician needs to "feel with and for his patient, over a prolonged time, what she finds so terrifying" (emphasis in original). Also stressed is the need for clinicians to confront their own fears and doubts about treatment. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Is There Life Without Mother?


Book Description

In this richly textured study of personal growth and creativity hemmed in by childhood disaster, Shengold compares the differing gifts and differing solutions of extraordinary talents as they seek to negotiate a universal longing to refind the mother without sliding back into neglect, abuse, and despair. In the foreground of his analysis are moving portraits of Jules Renard and Anthony Trollope and the densely packed traumatic legacy of their respective childhoods, the one limned in sustained psychological torture, the other framed by neglect and abandonment. Long acknowledged as a master of the literary-biographic genre within psychoanalysis, Shengold does not view the study of creative individuals as the occasion to make pontifical pronouncements about the nature of creativity. Rather, he sees such study as affording the opportunity to borrow from genius, insofar as the gifted writer who is psychologically astute often captures the challenges of life and the nuances of suffering in language that "ordinary" patients would use, if only they could. By integrating literary analysis with biographical data, Shengold arrives at an appealingly direct, demystified approach to great literature as a vehicle for apprehending the intricacies of enduring psychological dilemmas. For the solutions of truly creative individuals not only reflect an artistic temperament wed to extraordinarily gifts; they illuminate the solutions we are all in search of. Elegantly sparing in language and judicious in presenting source material, Is There Life Without Mother? is abundantly generous in the wealth of understanding it provides and the deeper reflection it provokes. From the subtleties of identification as a means of consolidating identity in the face of neglect to the return of the traumatic as a fate that even a writer's "literary revenge" cannot circumvent, this work takes the reader deeper into the wellsprings of personality change than that it is usually possible to go.




Parents Killing Children


Book Description

Parents Killing Children: Crossing the Invisible Line explores hidden forms of violence within the family. This socio-legal study addresses the interactions between the family and the state, focusing on six parent perpetrators and the ways in which child endangerment is concealed within society. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, mythology and a modelling of case study data, this book puts forward a unique conceptualisation of representation and risk, both on familial and state levels. The failure of the state to intervene and neutralise volatile perpetrators also sheds light on the socio-legal status of children – society’s most vulnerable – and the book concludes by discussing means by which the underlying social conditions and maladies symptomatic of child abuse and killing should be addressed.