Gerald Frederick Schoenewolf (born September 23, 1941) is an American psychoanalyst best known for his staunch promotion of neoclassical psychoanalytic theory.
He worked at various jobs from typing to graphic art to copywriting while he pursued acting and playwriting careers.
[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[3] (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.