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This book was derived from papers presented at the 21st Annual Margaret S. Mahler Symposium on Child Development held in Philadelphia in May, 1990. It consists of eight chapters, the first and the last of which are introductions and summaries by the first editor, Selma Kramer; the remaining six chapters and discussions concern aspects of the psychotherapy and psychoanalysis of male and female victims of incest. This book is yet another contribution to the burgeoning literature on sexual abuse of children. Psychoanalytic writings on actual incest were sparse until recent years. Although the contributors to this book attribute increase in writings on sexual abuse largely to an improvement in technique and more accuracy of the analytic work, it is also likely that there has been a dramatic shift in the detection of childhood sexual abuse in material that was previously treated as oedipal and preoedipal fantasy. The influence of Freud's work on whether childhood recollections of abuse are memories or fantastic reconstructions remains a major factor in psychoanalysis, but it is fair to say that the modern focus on the importance of actual incest on later psychopathology has been largely stimulated by workers in fields other than psychoanalysis. The contributors to this book are well known in the field of sexual trauma and incest and present the material from an ego-psychological perspective “developmentally informed” by the theories of Margaret Mahler. Other psychoanalytic conceptual frameworks are not considered in this collection.
The material is presented with rich clinical illustrations and erudite Mahlerian metapsychological explications of that case material. It is refreshing to see a volume in which the writers seldom stray from the clinical material. In her introduction, Kramer presents a summary of the psychopathological effects of incest from clinical data. Here Kramer sets the tone for the book by