Reply to Walter Davis' Review of Wounded by Reality: Understanding and Treating Adult Onset Trauma

I know Mac Davis to be a passionate reader of and contributor to psychoanalytic ideas and political realities in general so I was looking forward to reading his thoughts about my book Wounded by Reality: Understanding and Treating Adult Onset Trauma. Despite some of his generous comments, I am disappointed. It strikes me that Davis’ antipathy for relational theory and practice has led him to misunderstand many of my ideas, and he has elaborated these misunderstandings in ways that are simply inaccurate.

Davis (2007) characterizes my message thus: “What counts as cure or a return to health may really amount to no more than a restoration of the false conceptions of self, identity, coherence, agency, etc., that one claimed for oneself prior to the trauma because they gave a deluded conception of both oneself and one's world” (p 402). Putting aside Davis’ contempt for such constructs as self, identity, coherence, and agency, he is implying here that it is my therapeutic goal to return survivors of adult onset trauma to the level of functioning they had achieved prior to the catastrophe. Nowhere in my book do I use the words “cure” or “return to health.” I am extremely uncomfortable with the very concepts. I don't believe that it is possible to be “cured” of an adult onset trauma, nor do I claim that a return to the previous level of functioning is possible, let alone desirable. Rather, in working with a survivor of adult onset trauma, my goal is to enable the survivor to live with the memory of the trauma rather than being lived by it.

I am accused of “nostalgically” seeking to return survivors to “the strength found in innocence” (p 402). Was Davis so hampered by his distaste for relational theory that he jumped to the most simplistic interpretation possible? This wonderful expression, “the strength found in innocence,” is taken from Terrence Des Pres (1976) who uses it with pointed irony, as I do. Lest anyone should have been missed that point, I make it explicit at the