Warwick Middleton

Martin J. Dorahy

This edited collection brings together the perspectives of a broad spectrum of experts who reflect on Freud’s Seduction Theory, psychoanalysis, and the reality of child abuse through the work of Jeffrey Masson. Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984) is arguably the most controversial book on psychoanalysis in the last century. It provoked a furore from mainstream psychoanalysis, yet was well-received by the emerging international trauma field and became a bestseller. Four decades on, a group of international scholars and professionals revisit Masson’s original work and reflect on the lessons that can be taken from the saga. Was the reaction of Masson’s peers tied to the fact that he had accused Freud of being less than heroic, or was it that he confronted psychoanalysis with a very uncomfortable truth? This book examines how The Assault on Truth came to be written, why it sparked such an extreme reaction, and the issues Masson was grappling with. Complete with an extended Foreword by John Briere, a luminary of the modern trauma field, this book will be essential reading for practitioners, students, and researchers involved in contemporary psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology and especially trauma care, women’s mental health, child safety and the study of memory.

Revisiting Masson’s ‘The Assault on Truth’

Contemporary Perspectives on Freud's Seduction Theory and Psychotherapy

Vedat Sar

Martin Dorahy

Dissociative disorders are one of the psychiatric consequences of childhood psychological trauma. While oppression is an aspect of traumatic conditions, dissociation undermines resistance to oppression throughout a person’s lifespan. Neither oppression nor dissociation are restricted to particular cultures, and both can affect the individual as well as societies. This collection engages with the universality of dissociative disorders and their close relationship to oppression. The chapters cover extreme examples such as ongoing incest in adulthood, children and adults forced to kill others, and abusive states in interrogation. Further subjects examined include the utilization of dissociation in postmodern societies to maintain oppression, the oppressive conditions of asylum seekers and the consequences of oppression as they are dealt with in psychotherapy. The final chapter considers how a paedophile pandering network employed multi-layered oppression to prevent the public becoming aware of the widespread and organised abuse of children. This book will engender interactions between trauma investigators – those whose approach is close clinical observation, those who use instruments to survey groups of individuals, those whose research takes the form of investigative journalism, and those who examine the truth embedded or hidden in documents created for multiple, and at times, disturbing political purposes. Portions of this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. It also includes material from other sources.

Individual and Societal Oppression

Global Perspectives on Dissociative Disorders

Adah Sachs

Severe abuse often occurs in settings where the grouping, whether based around a family or a community organisation or institution, outwardly appears to be very respectable. The nature of attachment dynamics allied with threat, discrediting, the manipulation of the victim's dissociative defences, long-term conditioning and the endless invoking of shame mean that sexual, physical and emotional abuse may, in some instances, be essentially unending. Even when separation from the long-term abuser is attempted, it may initially be extremely difficult to achieve, and there are some individuals who never achieve this parting. Even when the abuser is dead, the intrapsychic nature of the enduring attachment experienced by their victim remains complicated and difficult to resolve. This volume includes multiple perspectives from highly experienced clinicians, researchers and writers on the nature of the relationship between the abused and their abuser(s). No less than five of this international grouping of authors have been president of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, the world's oldest international trauma society. This book, which opens with a highly original clinical paper on 'weaponized sex' by Richard Kluft, one of the foremost pioneers of the modern dissociative disorders field, concludes with a gripping historical perspective written by Jeffrey Masson as he reengages with issues that first brought him to worldwide prominence in the 1980s. Between these two pieces, the contributors, all highly acclaimed for their clinical, theoretical or research work, present original, cutting edge work on this complex subject. This book was originally published as a double special issue of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation.

Victim–Perpetrator Dynamics

The Abused and the Abuser

Michael Salter

Molly Dragiewicz

Jane Ussher

Elizabeth Conroy

Jackie Burke

Sheryle Vilenica

Beatriz Martin Monzon

Kyja Noack-Lundberg

Constructions of Complex Trauma and Implications for Women's Wellbeing and Safety from Violence

A Deep Wound Under My Heart

Warwick Middleton

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