Similarities and differences between incestuous and nonincestuous rape in a French follow-up study

[Freudian trauma]

An exploration of all Freud's writings on trauma from 1885 is proposed. Trauma, a central concept in his first works, always kept a place in his theory. He conceived it as a consequence of an external perception leading to a sudden affect which cannot be mastered by the psyche. For him, the excitation is so strong that it threatens the ego and provokes a breach of the protective shield. The idea that he would have renounced to this topic at the end of the nineteenth century is irrational.

Trauma in Rapes and Assaults

Psychological trauma primarily affects children and adolescents; it mostly results from physical and sexual maltreatment. In the Medico-Judicial Unit Center for Sexual Violence Victims in Tours, France, which I joined in 1992 for research and to give treatment, underage patients represented about three-quarters of patients. At the same time, a national survey was conducted in collaboration with Marie Choquet’s “Adolescent Health” group (INSERM), which targeted several thousand adolescents representing the general population. It revealed that almost one out of five adolescents had experienced physical or sexual assault, and that although the number of sexual assaults probably does not exceed that of physical assaults, most of the time their psychological consequences do considerably exceed those of physical assaults. Several symptoms appear after experiencing rapes or assaults. They have a distinct semiology and independent evolutions. We isolated three of them: dissociative and phobic traumatic syndrome, re-experiencing traumatic syndrome, and borderline-like traumatic syndrome. They are generally triggered all at the same time or in close succession. Re-experiencing traumatic syndrome is profound, but the other two are often more worrying, particularly in relation to children and adolescents, because they generate disorders in their psychological development.

[Personality and somatic disorders]

In the title of this text, by somatic disorders we mean those physical illnesses clearly related to a non-psychiatric medical field, frequently termed psychosomatic illnesses and somatoform disorders. For forty years, a trend of thought has focused with pertinence on the psychological peculiarities in patients with severe somatic diseases. Moreover, causality was often supposed in the regularly mentioned association between personality features and somatoform disorders. However, the revival of the study of the earlier field of relationships between mind and body by Briquet, Charcot, Janet and Freud in his first period has led to the reassessment of the meaning of these observations. This reexamination is marked out by several assertions. Two of them work as preliminaries to argumentation: 1. existential wounds may produce long-lasting personality alterations; 2. existential wounds may produce somatoform disorders. These phenomena have been rediscovered over the last few years among assaulted subjects as well as war veterans in whom a frequent occurrence of somatizations has been, in addition, closely linked to the incidence of behavior or personality disorders. Two theses then emerge: 1. somatic diseases may produce long-lasting personality alterations; 2. until now no premorbid personality univocally predisposing to somatic diseases could be found. Indeed, during the 1980s a growing body of negative results coming from retrospective and prospective studies as well as anatomical comparisons have accumulated upon the potential role of certain personality factors in the incidence of somatic illnesses. This dialectic leads to the connection of two corollary assertions: 1. "pensée opératoire" and "alexithymia" in patients with somatic diseases may represent only an effect of the announcement or chronicity of the organic disease; 2. the old "dissociative hysteria" with somatic manifestations finds its substratum in existential wounds and not in pre-trauma personality. Indeed, on the one hand, recent publications do not allow the assertion to be confirmed that alexithymia and "pensée opératoire" predispose to somatizations. On the other hand, personality disorders in subjects with "dissociative hysteria" as well as their somatoform symptoms appear mainly as an effect of an existential wound and express in fact the Janetian concept of "a drop in Psychological Tension". Then, in spite of their differences, conversion and psychosomatic symptoms share the property of being a primitive response to existential wounds in which the subject cannot produce any appropriate psychic or behavioral response to his distress. Light is shed on these phenomena when put alongside the field of "fixed ideas" thought of by Pierre Janet as the recourse to archaic automatisms. Indeed, the experience which contradicts the vision of existence provokes an "unspeakable terror". It is mentally unrepresented or represented in too slight a way. In such cases, no previous personality prevails, but the resulting personality often appears modified, including when the breakdown of vision of the existence results from the diagnosis of an illness or its protracted course.

Psychiatric comorbidity of patients on methadone maintenance treatment with a history of sexual abuse

The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of a history of sexual abuse and its relation to psychiatric comorbidity among former opiate addicts currently on methadone maintenance treatment (MMT). We evaluated the history of sexual abuse and current clinical obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), dissociative identity disorder (DID), and complex posttraumatic distress disorder (cPTSD), and administered the Life Events Inventory Questionnaire among 125 MMT patients (76 females and 49 males). Eighty (64%) patients had experienced sexual abuse, 69 (55.2%) met the criteria for clinical OCD, 20 (16.0%) for cPTSD and 13 (10.4%) for DID. More females had clinical OCD than males (63.2% vs. 42.9%, respectively, p=0.03). Sexually abused patients had higher rates of clinical OCD than their non-abused counterparts (67.5% vs. 33.3%, respectively, p<0.0005) and a higher mean number of negative life events (8.0±2.0 vs. 7.1±1.8, p=0.01). Sexually abused patients showed a trend towards a higher Dissociative Experiences Scale score (17.6±10.1 vs. 14.6±8.1, p=0.08) and rate of DID (13.8% vs. 4.4%, p=0.1), but no significant difference in the rate of cPTSD (17.5% vs. 13.3%, p=0.6) compared to non-abused subjects. The 80 sexually abused patients were mostly female (85%), and 57.5% of them were abused by a family member. In summary, more sexually abused MMT patients were diagnosed with clinical OCD and fewer with cPTSD and DID. Those with cPTSD were characterized by more negative life events, higher dissociation scores, and assaults by a family member. We conclude that sexually abused MMT patients should be screened for clinical OCD.

Betrayal trauma: associations with psychological and physical symptoms in young adults

Betrayal trauma, or trauma perpetrated by someone with whom a victim is close, is strongly associated with a range of negative psychological and physical health outcomes. However, few studies have examined associations between different forms of trauma and emotional and physical symptoms. The present study compared betrayal trauma to other forms of trauma as predictors of young adults' psychological and physical symptoms, and explored potential mediators. A total of 185 university undergraduate students completed the Brief Betrayal Trauma Survey, the Trauma Symptom Checklist, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, and the Pennebaker Inventory of Limbic Languidness. For each set of symptoms, simultaneous multiple regressions assessed the relative contributions of low versus high betrayal trauma to psychological and physical health reports. Structural equation models examined traumatic stress symptoms and alexithymia as mediators of the relationship between betrayal trauma and physical health symptoms. A total of 151 participants (82%) reported exposure to at least 1 of 11 forms of trauma queried (M = 2.08, SD = 1.94); 96 participants (51.9%) reported at least 1 betrayal trauma. Traumas characterized by high betrayal predicted alexithymia, anxiety, depression, dissociation, physical health complaints, and the number of days students reported being sick during the past month, whereas other traumas did not. Structural equation modeling revealed that traumatic stress symptoms and alexithymia mediated the association between betrayal trauma and physical health complaints. These results indicate that betrayal trauma is associated with young adults' physical and mental health difficulties to a greater extent than are other forms of trauma. Results may inform assessment, intervention, and prevention efforts.