Childhood sexual abuse within the family of origin and society's institutions, such as the church, education, sports, and the world of celebrity, has been neglected as a significant issue by psychoanalysis and society. The incest trauma needs to be understood as one of the most significant problems of contemporary society. This book is an attempt to re-establish incest trauma as a significant psychological disorder by tracing the evolutionary trajectory of psychoanalysis from the Seduction Theory to the Oedipal Therapy to the Confusion of Tongues Theory. By examining the theoretical, emotional, interpersonal, and political issues involved in Freud's abandoning the Seduction Hypothesis and replacing it with the Oedipal Complex, we can see how system building became more important than the emotional welfare of children. In a series of chapters the authors demonstrate this neglect of the incest trauma.
Following a case study approach organized around the psychoanalytic process, this book addresses clinical issues that arise in analytic work with adults who were sexually abused as children. Special emphasis is given to the way in which childhood sexual trauma affects the treatment process and influences the contents and quality of transference. Contributors also focus on the formation of the therapeutic alliance, countertransference issues, and disturbances in ego functions.
Presents an innovative approach to the confusions and dilemmas experienced by families in which incest has occurred. While not all incestuously abused children have the classic diagnostic symptoms of trauma, virtually all experience "relational trauma". Integrating social constructionist, feminist, and systems thinking, this treatment model focuses on strengthening the child's protective relationships, mobilizing families to help resolve the child's emotional and behavioral symptoms, and building resiliency.
This book offers a detailed road map for overcoming sexual and relationship impasses originating from painful childhood experiences. Large numbers of adults with histories of childhood trauma and neglect suffer persistent relationship and sexual difficulties. Unfortunately, most have failed to receive adequate help with emerging from these deep and complex problems. Coming Home to Passion: Restoring Loving Sexuality in Couples with Histories of Childhood Trauma and Neglect explores the enduring impacts—physiological, psychological, and behavioral—of childhood trauma and neglect. Author Ruth Cohn, drawing on 25 years of experience working with trauma survivors and their partners and families, lays out a practical and actionable course for recovery in clear, accessible language. This book provides direction and hope to those with trauma backgrounds while also serving as a unique resource for professional readers. Integrating in-depth information on attachment and relationship, trauma and neglect, and sexuality, Cohn details a practical, hands-on treatment approach for revitalizing love, health, and passion.
Although numerous books have been written about childhood incest and trauma, until now none of them has combined the best of what scientific psychology has to offer with detailed representation and narrative about the ways that childhood sexual trauma within the family context affects the lives of adult survivors. Naming the Shadows is the first book to offer practitioners and students-in-training an in-depth exploration of a trauma-focused approach to individual and group psychotherapy that respects scientific rules of evidence and at the same time attempts to honor the complexity and subjectivity of an individual survivor's experience. Roth and Batson, psychologist and psychiatrist, respectively, with many years of expertise in treating survivors of sexual trauma, explain how targets of treatment are conceptualized as identity and relational issues that derive from an enduring adaptation to childhood trauma. The authors believe that, at its best, psychotherapy provides a therapeutic social context in which survivors can achieve a true understanding of their adaptation and gain self-knowledge of the meaning and enduring influence of traumatic childhood experience. Drawing on the authors' own innovative research, on the widespread experience of colleagues, and on vivid dialogue from survivors themselves, Naming the Shadows has important implications for our understanding of the process of coping with childhood sexual abuse.
The first major study to challenge the narrow definition of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by rereading six American literary texts, this book argues for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. This interdisciplinary study traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives published in the last hundred years, from male-authored fiction to female-authored memoir, bringing new readings to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen case. This study builds on the work of those ushering in a second-wave of trauma theory, which has argued that the difficulty of speaking about a traumatic experience is not necessarily caused by neurobiological changes that prevent victims from recalling details. Rather, it’s from social and political repercussions. In other words, they argue that many who experience trauma aren’t unable to deliver accounts; they fear the results. There is a significant gender component to trauma, whose implications, along with those of race and class, have largely gone unexamined in the first-wave of trauma theory. Exploring two additional questions about articulating trauma, this book asks what happens when the voice of trauma is crying out from what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, second, what happens when the trauma is not just a time-limit event but chronic and cumulative experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in American literature. This book is written in part as a response to the psychological community which failed to include complex PTSD in the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5), denying victims, many of whom are father–daughter incest survivors, the validation and recognition they deserve and leaving many misdiagnosed and thereby mistreated.
Has there been an actual increase in the occurrence of incest? Or is the seemingly greater frequency due to our increased awareness of incest and more careful listening to our patients? The distinguished psychoanalysts contributing to this sharply focused volume take the latter position. They discuss various aspects of incest, the occurrence of which they agree is always traumatic to its victim. Incest occurs in dysfunctional families and often in the setting of multiple traumatic factors (e.g., emotional deprivation, physical abuse, parental alcoholism). In cases of parent-child incest, one parent is the perpetrator and the other, by silence or absence, unwittingly colludes with the former. While an individual with early sexual trauma may have a certain self-reliance, ambition, perseverance, and tenacious pursuit of self-knowledge, the fact remains that incest is inimical to normal, healthy development. It leads to profoundly deleterious effects, including lifelong guilt, sadomasochistic tendencies, defects of self-esteem, sexual dysfunction, and vulnerability to psychosomatic phenomena, accidents, injuries, depression, and even suicide. It is therefore extremely important to be able to recognize the phenomenological and psycho-dynamic configurations suggesting that incest has occurred in the individual's past. Such knowledge enables therapists to be more alert to the nuances of transference and countertransference, leading to a heightened empathy and to more precise and helpful interpretations. The contributors to this book highlight, with the help of detailed and poignant clinical illustrations, various cues of incest-related psychopathology. They discuss the transferencemanifestations of such patients and, in an extremely helpful manner, clarify the subtleties in treatment technique. By so addressing the phenomenon of incest, this book makes an important inroad into the prevention and amelioration of the profound psychic trauma- the trauma of transgression- caused by the use of a child's body for the sexual gratification of the parent.
