Cultural Trauma and Countertransference Experiences of Therapists Dealing With Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Response to Kathleen McPhillips

Abstract

My response to Kathleen McPhillips’s paper focuses on the pervasiveness of vicarious trauma for those working with survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Attempts to avoid the impact of vicarious trauma may in fact lead to denial, dissociation, or amnesia. Cultural trauma, as unearthed by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse Commission, can also be linked with the wider theme of Australia’s history of migration. Migrants who came to Australia fleeing various forms of trauma, have, at times, felt betrayed by the new country. This sense of betrayal is compounded if, for example, institutional sexual abuse suffered by their offspring, is ignored or denied. The abuse suffered by children in Australian institutions has led to trauma on both personal and cultural levels. Healing, therefore, may require both individual help, and ethical responsiveness on a more collective level. The Royal Commission serves to provide a container for its examination. Such public recognition is but one step in processes of reparation that need to take place on individual and cultural levels. McPhillips’s work may also serve as a vital part of this process.

Notes

¹ In the clinical examples that are used in the paper, all identifying details have been changed to protect client and supervisee confidentiality. Although the examples used are based on events that actually happened, “Elena” and “Maria” are fictionalized amalgams of several supervisees and the patients that they see.

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Notes on contributors

Judith Pickering

Judith Pickering, Ph.D., is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, family and couple therapist in private practice in Sydney. She is a Supervisor and Faculty Member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapy and a Training Analyst with the Australian and New Zealand Association of Jungian Analysts. She is a member of the Couple and Family Psychotherapy Association of Australasia, the British Society of Couple Psychotherapists and Counsellors and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. She has published and lectured in Australia, the United States, and Europe, and is the author of Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love (Routledge, 2008) and The Meaning of Life: Psychotherapy as Spiritual Practice (Routledge, in press).