interview shonkoff
Sunday July 20, 2008

AM: ‘Maybe you will once want to write about your own experience usingthe research others have done and showing concretely how you found your way of overcoming the terrible abuse you were suffering already before you were born.’

Yes, thank you for the thought. Maybe it helps if I can show how I am the living proof that your work is true and highly effective. If a heroin born baby who was abused and neglected for 5 long years can overcome his depression, cure his illnesses and lead a healthy life – all because one summer afternoon he accidently picked up The Drama of the Gifted Child from a shelf in the library! – who can’t reverse the (brain) damage done? It will be much better time spent than writing my philosophy thesis…

Anyway, I have copied the interview with Shonkoff in a Word-document you find attached, and I’ll forward two smaller ones separately from which I have quoted.

Thank both of you again for answering my letters, it is very inspiring and encouraging. I. S.

AM: Thanks for your letter and the interview. I don’t know which kind of therapy you are having now, but I hope that it is with somebody who is neither afraid of your story nor of her own. Like you, I hope that the brain researchers once in the future will be able to clearly inform people about what they are doing to their children by beating and humiliating them, teaching them violence, by denying the suffering they themselves had to endure in their childhood, by worshiping instead their abusers and ancestors, by ignoring the EMOTIONAL NEEDS of their children etc. Unfortunately, the interview with Sh. seems to me far away from this insight. Both persons speak about the child growing up in an abstract “environment”, the concrete word “parent” is never mentioned, words like fear, mistreatment, torture have been avoided throughout the long text. My impression is that there is much good will but still much fear of the own parents and the own history that blocks the sight towards the truth.