In this News Bulletin we bring a portrait of Linda Schierse Leonard. Please enjoy below Misser Berg’s presentation of and correspondence with Linda Schierse Leonard

It is a privilege and a great pleasure for me to write this portrait of Linda Schierse Leonard, the colleague in the Spotlight in the January 2026 issue of the Bulletin.

I became acquainted with Linda’s writing during my analytic training in the 1980s.

It was a very creative period, with a critical focus on the understanding of gender, among other things. Together with other progressive Jungian women, Linda wrote inspiringly about women’s conditions in our patriarchal society. Linda also wrote compellingly in The Wounded Woman about the father-daughter relationship, openly sharing her own experiences while illustrating her groundbreaking theories with symbolic material such as dreams, fairy tales, myths, films, and literature. The Wounded Woman was rejected 42 times initially, and as Linda says, knowing it got rejected in the beginning might help other writers not to give up.
After it was published in 1982, The Wounded Woman became an international bestseller, it was translated into 20 languages, including my mother-tongue Danish – and it has never gone out of print. Actually, it just came out in China, Poland and Turkey this year. The book remains relevant today, and its theories and descriptions continue to be used in presentations, seminars, etc.

Part of The Wounded Woman contained descriptions of Linda’s wounded and alcoholic father and her personal work in dealing with the problems that this entailed. But later, in Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction, Linda wrote honestly and creatively about her own alcoholism. She will elaborate on this in the following, just as she will discuss her other major book production, which can be seen in the lovely photograph above.

But the portrait is about much more than books. Linda has had a long and very eventful life. She knew many of our colleagues who are no longer with us, and she studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich in the 1960s. She is a co-founder of the Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts and continues to be active. You can read much more about all this below.

Over the past few weeks, Linda and I have been corresponding via email. Below, I have attempted to compile the very rich material that has emerged from our dialogue. Some of it has been shortened in the text, but I have included a link so that you can read the entire text. I hope that, like me, you will enjoy getting to know Linda Schierse Leonard better.

My first question to Linda was “When did you become interested in Jung / Analytical Psychology, and what was it that captured your interest?” Here is Linda’s reply: ….Click HERE to read more

Linda generously gave us so many interesting reflections. You may read the full portrait by clicking HERE