Betrayal Trauma

The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse

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by Jennifer J. Freyd

Harvard University Press

Due/Published April 1998, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0674068068

Laying bare the logic of forgotten abuse, Freyd explains how psychogenic amnesia not only happens but, if the abuse occurred at the hands of a parent or caregiver, is often necessary for survival. With real-life examples, she describes betrayal trauma, a blockage of information that would otherwise interfere with one's ability to function within an essential relationship--that of parent and dependent child, for instance. She suggests that knowledge is multilayered, and that we can know and not know at once--and that implicit memory may surface in oblique ways: as specific phobias, learned behaviors, an image of oneself as a "bad boy" or "bad girl."