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The scope of this book is clinical. "Its aim is to explore the problems of technique that are often encountered in attempts to treat in psychoanalysis [those] adults who were sexually abused as children" (p. 4). It is divided into three main sections: Introduction and Overview, Clinical Considerations and Psychoanalytic Process, and Issues of Technique. The introduction reviews the history of the importance of actual trauma in Freud's early view of neurosogenesis. It covers ground which is currently the object of renewed analytic interest.
The complicated questions addressed by the contributors are made explicit by the questions Levine poses in the introduction: "We are unable to accurately evaluate the nature and basis for Freud's evidence in formulating the seduction theory. Thus, the possibility exists that the still nascent stage of the analytic theory and technique on which he had to depend left Freud with a methodology that was not adequate to the task of discerning actual from fantasied childhood traumata and that he was led to his conclusions in part by his theoretical preconceptions of what he would find, rather than the data of his clinical encounters" (p. 18).