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In a series of papers beginning in 1963 and culminating in two books, one in 1988 and this one in the year following, Leonard Shengold, a classical analyst in the school of ego psychology, has conducted one of the most thorough and profound turnarounds in the history of psychoanalytic theory. From his own clinical experience, he has deduced that Freud's first theory of psychoanalysis, that of the censorship of child sexual seduction, was accurate more often than we care to believe. Others, notably William Niederland and Jeffrey Masson, have argued in the same arena, but Masson's viewpoints are dominated by rhetoric and are not systematized, integrated, and scholarly, as are the studies of Shengold, whose direction seems to have been formed in part by Niederland's scholarship in the autobiography of Senatspresident Schreber.
Indeed, the author has taken the poignant complaint of Schreber, “soul murder,” for the title of his work, and this indeed is a fitting choice. Though the term “soul” was often used by Freud, it seems not to have been translated by Strachey in the English edition of Freud's work. “Soul” is a term that precedes and yet transcends “ego” and also has spiritual connotations. “Murder” stands for itself. Thus, we could render “soul murder” as the “breaking of one's spirit.” What Shengold seems to have been preoccupied with is the murder of “innocence,” a term I find to be overlapping with “soul” and that likewise has an ancient spiritual ancestry.
Shengold is in effect accomplishing a reversal of the taint under which the infant and child were inadvertently placed by Freud's second theory of psychoanalysis, that of the primacy of fantasy over reality. Thus, psychoanalysis followed the Judeo-Christian legacy of reifying that the infant was born in original sin; from the