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Almost exactly a year before I sat down to write this review, NBC released Access Hollywood tapes in which then presidential candidate Donald Trump admitted to sexual assault. Shortly thereafter, according to a report in The Nation (Brave New Films, 2016), at least 16 brave women accused him of sexual boundary violations. Trump excused his comments as “locker room talk,” and politicians and voters thought his behavior toward women to be either irrelevant or inconsequential. He was elected anyway. However, at the end of the first year of his presidency, it seems that we are in the midst of a significant social and cultural shift in the way that women's stories of sexual assault are heard, understood, processed, and responded to in the public sphere. Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Mark Halperin, Roy Moore, Al Franken, Charlie Rose, and others have faced serious political and personal consequences as the accusations against them are taken seriously and the women making these accusations are believed.
The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma emerges in the context of this significant social shift, gives voice to the experience of trauma, and theorizes about the way in which our minds manage traumatic experience. As Howell and Itzkowitz outline in the introductory chapters, Freud's early work with hysterical patients led to his conclusion that “he had found the source of hysteria in early traumatic seductions (abuse)” (p. 26). Howell and Itzkowitz call Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory in favor of his later ideas about childhood sexual fantasy “a dissociative gap in theory” (p. 26). They review several reasons for this dissociative gap, including that Freud concluded that “there simply could not be that many perpetrators” (p. 27) in Vienna. Many today find it difficult to believe research showing that 20% of girls and 5% of boys are victims of child sexual abuse (The National Center for Victims of Crime, 2017), just as Freud