Season of light/season of darkness: The effects of burying and remembering traumatic sexual abuse on the sense of self

This paper considers the disruptive effects of defensively forgetting childhood sexual abuse on the sense of self. Defense analysis, leading to access to and control of affects and associated recall of forgotten events is a crucial aspect of understanding and treating the resulting self disorders. The defenses of dissociation, denial and repression will be considered with regard to some of the basic effects on the sense of self which come from employing them. A case discussion illustrates the strengthening of the sense of self of a patient with a profoundly traumatic past when these defenses are systematically disrupted through psychotherapy.This paper was originally presented as the keynote address on the psychoanalytic track at the Federated Societies for Clinical Social Work meeting in Chicago in September of 1991. The author would like to thank the organizers of that conference and, in particular, the members of the program committee of the Committee on Psychoanalysis, chaired by Rosemary Gaeta, for their invitation to present.The author would also like to thank many friends and colleagues for their help in preparing this paper. In particular, Dr. James Masterson, Dr. Eleanor Grayer, Andrea Stone, MSW, Dr. Shelly Nagel, Dr. Stephen Reed and Stewart Clark, took the time and trouble to make many helpful comments. In addition, I would like, in particular, to thank Dr. Candace Orcutt, whose thinking about trauma and dissociative states has had a profound influence upon my work.