The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma
A clinical psychologist, Rogers (A Shining Affliction) has spent 15 years researching girls and young women, and here she uses those case studies, along with her own experiences-part I details how, as a teenager, Rogers was treated for schizophrenia with weekly electroconvulsive therapy-to demonstrate how discovering the "unsayable" helps unlock the psyche of sexual abuse victims. Skeptical of the traditional therapy paradigm for treating sexual trauma, Rogers came to practice Lacanian psychoanalysis, which builds on "the logic of Freud's unconscious which links language, bodily symptoms, slips of the tongue and failed or incomplete acts-to 'say' things the conscious mind didn't want to know anything about." The second part delves into the Lacanian technique, examining its application in real-life subjects. Rogers goes in depth into several particularly disturbing and resonant cases-a multi-generational tragedy and a quartet of abusive victims among them-before returning to her own story, in which she came to believe she was Joan of Arc. Powerful and often tragic, Rogers conveys her stories with a poetic attention to words, making a compelling and heartbreaking case for the value of psychoanalysis and the restorative power of the human mind.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.