Reply to Jan Wiener

I would like to thank Jan Wiener for her thoughtful response to the points raised in my essay.

Wiener proposes that, by relating details of the interaction between myself and the analyst who exploited me, I might have intended to cause revulsion in the readers of this journal. My choice of a professional journal for a publication venue should distinguish my essay from others intended for general readers many of whom, because of a lack of knowledge about boundary violations and adult-onset trauma, might very well have only the reactions she describes, rather than a full range of thoughts on the matter. My experience in approaching professionals (mainly in search of a suitable subsequent analyst or therapist) made me aware that some analysts are not cognizant of the extreme degree of damage that boundary violations cause, nor are they aware that severe damage gets done prior to the bright-white legal line of sex. This is the main and the conscious reason why I narrated such details. As this readership is well aware, discomfort, and the view of the victim as having a whole range of degenerated attributes, including exhibitionist motives, are natural responses to a horrific event. Dori Laub's heartfelt meditation on Holocaust survivors attests to the difficulty of witnessing such an experience: ‘the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself’ (1992, p. 57). Laub also reflects that the listener cannot but experience an array of reactions of distaste, some even falling on the victim. Paradoxically these arise from the mission to heal and to help, out of the necessity for the healer to find a way to ‘carry out his task’ of witnessing (1992, p. 72).

With regard to language choice, I understand that terms such as ‘perpetrator’ and ‘abuser’ have entered legal and administrative lexicons, but in my experience they do accurately express what transpired. I believe