Betrayal Trauma

Jennifer J. Freyd is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon.

A century of observation leaves no doubt that some traumatized people develop amnesia for the event and may not recall their experiences. How can we understand this?...Freyd calls attention...to the social context in which the trauma occurs. The relationship between the victim and the perpetrator is central to her theory. "In order to survive in cases of core betrayals (abuse by a trusted caregiver on a dependent victim) some amount of information blockage is required."...In one of the most ingenious and original sections of the book, Freyd puts her hypothesis to the test by reanalyzing data from four recently published studies of adults with histories of childhood sexual abuse. In each case, she finds that those who were abused by close relatives were more likely to have forgotten the abuse...[This book is] a thoughtful and impassioned treatise by a survivor who has transformed her own betrayal trauma into an investigation of the psychology of memory.

• 1. Betrayal Blindness 2. Conceptual Knots 3. Context and Controversy 4. Why Forget? 5. Ways of Forgetting 6. Testable Predictions 7. Creating Connections Afterword References Acknowledgments Index