Factor Structure,Reliability, and Known Groups Validity of the German Version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Short-Form) in Swiss Patients and Nonpatients

The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form is the most widely used instrument to assess childhood trauma and has been translated into 10 languages. However, research into validity and reliability of these translated versions is scarce. The present study aimed to investigate the factor structure, internal consistency, reliability, and known-groups validity of the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form (Bernstein & Fink, 1998). Six-hundred and sixty-one clinical and nonclinical participants completed the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the 5-factor structure of the original Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form. To investigate known-groups validity, the confirmatory factor analysis latent factor levels between clinical and nonclinical participants were compared. The original 5-factor structure was confirmed, with only the Physical Neglect scale showing rather poor fit. As a conclusion, the results support the validity and reliability of the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form. It is recommended to use the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form to assess experiences of childhood trauma.     

Unlocking Diane Arbus

In these five short reviews, the photographic work of Diane Arbus is illuminated from different personal and professional perspectives, ranging from interpreting her photographs as a sort of theft—taking something away from the individuals she photographed—to an intense desire to partake in a world of human beings living on the edge of society. The question occupying all reviewers is how Arbus's personality and style allowed her to enter into the worlds of demimondes, nudist camps, and dominatrixes without necessarily exploiting the privileged position she earned to occupy vis-á-vis her subjects.     

Discussion of Paper by Warman and Rousseau

The story of trauma, in contemporary culture, has shifted, from one of painful, formative experience, to one of injustice and the imperative to rectify an untoward event. Journalists, politicians, and memoirists have become adept at making a narrative of trauma, at finding the story that focuses away from the experience of the wounds to the injustice of having been wounded. As a result, people tend to seek stories of suffering that have a beginning, middle, and, most important, an end, rather than stories of suffering that are not dramatic, that are not moral, but that have a lasting impact. People coming for therapy or analysis, too, look for the dramatic explanation for their suffering, to be the hero in their own narrative. And those of us who treat the sufferers too often protect ourselves from the universality of pain by looking for the trauma story. In recent therapeutic culture, the trauma story has been of a formulaic kind, which is in keeping with our culturally preferred relationship to trauma.

In this article, I draw from two treatments to illustrate the power of our cultural trauma narrative and my own implication in it.     

Straight therapists working with lesbians and gays in family therapy

This article uses a cultural literacy model to sensitize straight marital and family therapists (MFTs) to work with gays, lesbians, and their families. While most MFTs number gays and lesbians among their clients, differences in sexual orientation between therapist and clients are often insufficiently addressed, closing off therapeutic possibilities. Marital and family therapists are asked to systematically assess homophobic and heterosexist assumptions in both personal attitudes and professional theory and practice and to educate themselves about gay culture and family life. The role of disclosure, trust, and collaborative meaning making in creating a therapeutic relationship that is culturally sensitive, clinically effective, and ethically responsible is examined.     

Stalinism,famine, and Chinese peasants

Conclusions What do the two cases have in common and what sets them apart? Both have in common a high degree of administrative incompetence and mismanagement. The preceding analysis shows this clearly in the Chinese case. In the Soviet case, the issue of incompetence can be formulated as follows: Given the decision to extract rural resources for the sake of industrialization, how could the damage to agriculture and peasant morale be minimized? Stalinist planners could have learned lessons from some of their predecessors, who had similar problems, such as the Bolsheviks of 1918–1920 or Count Witte of the Russia of the 1890s, who also harshly squeezed the peasantry on behalf of industrialization. Stalinist officials, however, plunged into the tasks of collectivization and grain procurement without giving much thought to procedures that might secure minimal peasant subsistence and hence keep alienation within bounds. The result was to set in motion a cycle of repression and concessions that culminated in the 1932–33 famine.Administrative incompetence in the Soviet Union was linked to the fundamental stance of the state toward the peasants, which was one of war. The state viewed its relations with the peasants as a zero-sum conflict - it's them or us, as one Central Committee member reportedly put it. The state adopted a scarcely disguised view of peasants as enemies. This conflictual posture was the basis for Stalin's determination to force the peasants unconditionally to subordinate their interests to those of the state. Even if top leaders did not make an explicit decision to inflict famine upon peasants, they were prepared to pay this price. The catastrophe of 1932–33 was thus an extreme manifestation of the conflictual state-peasant relationship that characterized the entire Stalin era: For a good quarter of a century, extracting grain from the peasants amounted to a permanent state of warfare against them and was understood as such by both sides. In the Chinese case there is simply no evidence that the state regarded peasants in this light, Mao's acknowledgment of interest conflicts notwithstanding. There is no evidence that GLF procurements were viewed as a weapon of war or of punishment, designed to force peasants into submission to state goals. What then was the state's stance toward the peasants during the GLF? It was to harness the peasantry to unprecedentedly ambitious developmental goals, goals shaped by Mao's new ideological conceptions. In the process of implementing them, the state's domination of the peasantry reached new heights, thereby bringing China closer to Stalinist reality. As in Stalin's case, GLF policy called for increased extraction of resources from the peasants, not just for national but also for local purposes. But this was based on the assumption that a breakthrough had occurred in agricultural production, a belief, in other words, that increased extraction was compatible with peasant welfare. This assumption turned out to be erroneous; it was part and parcel of the extraordinary mismanagement of the GLF. Famine was an unanticipated outcome of this mismanagement, an outcome for which Mao Zedong and his associates are responsible.When Chinese leaders finally realized what was going on in late 1960 they retreated from the policies of the Great Leap Forward. In the years that followed, procurement continued to be an important issue of conflict between the state and the peasants, but both the extent of extraction and the conflict fell significantly short of the Stalinist case. To the extent that in relation to the peasants Stalinism amounted to the intentionally extreme exploitation of the peasants, to that extent the Stalinist label is not fully appropriate even for the Great Leap Forward, nor for the rest of the Maoist era.

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