You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Child abuse through the worldwide prostitution of children is estimated to affect 170 million children, i.e. 3.8 per cent of the world's total population (Defence for Children International, 1984). It is considered that over 100 million children in the world are suffering from malnutrition (Rieser & Mason, 1990). In the UK 75 per cent of babies under one year old are hit (Leach, 1999). Russell (1983) in the US found that 38 per cent of a group of 930 adult women in San Francisco gave a history of childhood abuse and Finkelhor (1984) found 19.2 per cent of women and 9 per cent of men in a college population gave a history of childhood abuse. Against this world background, what is the position of the psychoanalyst or psychoanalytical psychotherapist in understanding the interplay of external and internal forces?
At the South African Psychoanalysis Trust conference in Cape Town in April 1999, some township trauma workers treating torture victims found it both disturbing and stimulating to engage with some analysts who were moved by their experiences but could not theoretically encompass them. Some of these could at times