Discussion

The study of childhood trauma and the field of psychoanalysis can be compared to a little boy and little girl who grew up next door to each other. In early childhood they were the closest of friends and virtually inseparable. When they reached latency, they no longer wanted anything to do with each other, and they parted ways. And now, as they leave the turmoils of adolescence and slouch their way toward maturity, they have once again found one another. This volume marks the occasion of this timely reunion, and the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute deserves our gratitude for bringing together this superb group of scholars and clinicians to discuss the significance of the rejoining of the two disciplines.

Psychoanalysis had its difficult birth 100 years ago through Freud's observation that “at the bottom of every case … there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the early years of childhood but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades” (1896, p. 203). He soon came to question the pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse and decided that fantasy was more central to neurosogenesis than actual trauma. The ensuing period of separation between the study of childhood sexual trauma and psychoanalysis was a prolonged one. Indeed, Simon and Bullock (1994) have noted that nearly 70 years elapsed between the publication of the first psychoanalytic book on incest, Otto Rank's 1912 book, The Incest