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4 J. Forensic Psychiatry & Psych. 1 (1993)

handle is hein.journals/jnlofncpy4 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIALS Denial and childhood sexual abuse CHRISTOPHER DARE At a workshop in the Institute of Family Therapy in 1984 a group of colleagues from Dublin, tongues firmly in cheeks, commented that they had in the previous month seen the first case of incest involving a child that had ever occurred in Ireland. Denial may seem to be purely casuistical or convenient, but what at one level seems purely a social form can, at another level, be transmuted into what appears like an actual literal failure to know of something that happened. Incest seems particularly to be a subject-matter upon which denial can function as conscious lying or as psychological repression into unconsciousness of obvious facts. In the practice of psychotherapy adult patients may perceive aspects of themselves which lead them to believe that they could have been sexually abused by their fathers or mothers but even in the privacy and revelation of the psychoanalytical psychotherapeutic context they cannot discover whether it is true or not. The ambiguity around sexual abuse derives from the power of the denial leading to an apparent repression and powerful forgetfulness. The examples of adults who do not know whether or not they have been sexually abused show that there is also a process of confusion of memory. However, there also seem to be powerful processes within society leading to denial of sexual abuse having occurred. In 1992 a 22-year-old woman, Rebecca E., was referred for psychiatric opinion. The family doctor put, as her major problem, that she had been sexually abused by her grandfather. When she was seen her complaints focused around panic attacks and recurrent abdominal cramps. These had been assessed as being due to an 'irritable bowel'. She talked quite readily of her grandfather's abuse of her but the details were vague. She said that it had all come back to her when she had left home at the age of 18 to go to college and had started her first serious and sexual relationship. Lately, there had been a family reunion. She had attempted to avoid her grandfather and had failed and now her symptoms were even worse. She knew that her mother as a child had also been sexually abused by this man.

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