Gerald Frederick Schoenewolf (born September 23, 1941) is an American psychoanalyst best known for his staunch promotion of neoclassical psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of 13 books on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
Schoenewolf was born to Harold Frederick Schoenewolf and Minna Henrietta Joseph in Fredericksburg, Texas on September 23, 1941. He was the third of four sons.[1] After graduating from high school in Kerrville, Texas in 1960, he attended North Texas State University for a year and then moved to New York City. He worked at various jobs from typing to graphic art to copywriting while he pursued acting and playwriting careers. He completed his BA degree at Goddard College in Vermont (1975), an MA in philosophy from California State University, Dominguez Hills (1978) and a Ph.D. from The Union Institute & University in Cincinnati (1981). He received a Certificate in Psychoanalysis from the Washington Square Institute in New York (1981) and began practice as a psychotherapist in 1979. He has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College since 2002.
His first book, 101 Common Therapeutic Blunders: Countertransference and Counterresistance in Psychotherapy (1987),[2] was written with his mentor Richard C. Robertiello, MD, and was an instant psychotherapy bestseller. Subsequently he became known as a neoclassical psychoanalyst and defender of Freudian theories and was largely shunned by the psychoanalytic community when Sigmund Freud’s theories came under attack by feminists and others.[3] During his time serving as an advisor for the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) he came under criticism from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for authoring an article[4] for NARTH in which he suggested that African slaves sold to the United States by African slave traders may have been better off in America.[5] In two of his books, The Art of Hating (1991)[6] and Psychoanalytic Centrism: Collected Papers of a Neoclassical Psychoanalyst (2012), he developed his theory of gender narcissism, in which he speculated that many males and females suffer from a kind of narcissism rooted in unconscious feelings of inferiority about their gender that causes them to sometimes become overly proud and obsessive about it. In the latter work, he also introduced the theory of the Death Trauma, which occurs in childhood when an individual first becomes aware of mortality. This awareness can then affect personality formation.[7]