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The publication of Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work has created a stir, for it coincides with a national movement to recognize childhood sexual abuse as a serious and widespread issue. The phrase “breaking the silence” has come to be synonymous with the long-denied liberation of incest survivors and the exposure of child-rearing practices that disguise previously unacknowledged victimization and dehumanization. The psychological damage inflicted upon children by their own families has finally found redress in the courts and in the national mind.
Inevitably, uncovering a repressed history has implicated psychoanalysis in what has also become a legal and a political crisis, for often the rights of the accused are pitted against the testimony of the victim without benefit of decisive physical evidence. Explaining to a judge or jury why that testimony may be covert, incomplete, or inconsistent puts the clinician in a tricky situation: he must persuade judge and jury that the victim's present psychological state (depressive behavior, faulty memory, ambivalent attitudes towards the accused) results from the abuse; but he must also argue that these symptoms are not the result of any other disorder for which the abuser cannot be held responsible. Thus the “expert witness” must be an expert not only about abuse but about any other psychological or psychiatric condition that can mimic symptoms of abuse. If he does not make a thorough differential diagnosis, the psychoanalyst may succumb to the hazard of special pleading, ignoring conflicting or competing evidence (or making inflated claims for inadequate evidence) because he is too committed to an emotionally compelling diagnosis.