What Happened, Who Cares, and What Difference Does It Make?

Reviews the book, Adult Analysis and Childhood Sexual Abuse edited by Howard B. Levine (1990). The various authors in this edited work view trauma from its elaboration in play, fantasy, overt symptoms, character formation, and subsequent developmental disturbances and in the connection of memory and affect to the unconscious, including repression. The clinicians' contributing chapters include analysts with a smattering of childhood sexual abuse cases, a contributor who has devoted most of his professional life to systematic study of child abuse and the sexual maltreatment of children (Brant F. Steele), and an accomplished clinician with extensive experience in treating adolescent and adult victims of incest (Julien Bigras). The aspiration of the editor to compile chapters by experienced practitioners and to clinically and theoretically explore and illustrate the interrelation between external trauma and unconscious fantasy in a psychoanalytic perspective is quite successfully achieved. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)