ABSTRACT
The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief. To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature. The feminist movement marks the third dialectic of trauma. Attention to the psychological trauma of sexual abuse, rape and domestic violence revealed some striking similarities between women’s experiences and the experiences of those who had survived the Vietnam War. A psychoanalytic understanding of trauma as ‘unclaimed’ or inaccessible raises some critical questions about the authenticity and subjectivity of memory. Although the psychological condition of hysteria is no longer recognized as a medical disorder. Viseur-Sellers explained that the inaccuracy of a rape victim’s testimony ‘speaks more about the volumes of sexual violence that they endured as opposed to the question of credibility as to the acts’.
