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Dr. Gartner is a prolific writer in the field of sexual abuse in general, but in particular he is a tireless advocate for male victims. His pioneering efforts are a major contribution to a previously unrecognized domain in traumatology, the sexual abuse of boys by men. He is the author of two books, Betrayed as Boys, published in 1999, and Beyond Betrayal: Taking Charge of Your Life After Boyhood Sexual Abuse, published in 2005. He also curated four collections of articles, three of them published in 2017. The edited books came to fruition in response to his initiative and clinical thinking on this topic.
I will present a summary of his original contributions as a prelude to assessing his latest work, Trauma and Counter-Trauma, Resilience and Counter-Resilience. The collections that followed the original books referenced them explicitly or implicitly. Although each collection can stand independently, their richness emerges cumulatively, as different articles layer our understanding and offer different perspectives about the abuse of boys by men and also about trauma in general. What is distinctive about these contributions is that the material is written from a psychoanalytic perspective, and the majority of the chapters are written by clinicians trained in both trauma work and psychoanalysis.
In Gartner’s first book, Betrayed as Boys (1999), he poignantly describes his treatment of a man who suffered years of incest by his father. This man’s memories of abuse became buried, surfacing only after the birth of his son. In tracing the impact of this abuse, he articulated that, almost more than the physical abuse, the damage was due to betrayal, defined as the interpersonal violation of implicit and
explicit trust, the introduction of treachery into the most intimate bonds of the family and relatedness (p. 13–15).
For people in the field of trauma work, the contents of Dr. Gartner’s first two books now seem like “old knowledge.” That, in itself, testifies to the broad d