ABSTRACT
The theme of this collection, “Representing the Unrepresentable”, could also be the title of Freud’s longstanding examination, discussion, and theory development of how sexuality and sexual trauma come – or don’t come – into expression. Freud’s examination began with his original scientific ambition from his Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer 1955) of uncovering a causal relationship showing that child sexual abuse expresses itself through bodily symptoms in a significant way that can be attributed to a specific starting point, thus proving what really happened. Present societal as well as academic discussions of what infantile sexuality is, how it expresses itself, and how it can be understood and not least protected, seem to hold on to Freud’s original ambition of finding a causal connection between an event and its expression: its symptom or its representation (see Elkovitch et al. 2009).
