Trauma, Shame, and Secret Making

Trauma, Shame, and Secret Making provides a descriptive, qualitative inquiry into a family's unsuccessful attempts across generations to repress the memories of an early life trauma. Broad in its scope, Trauma, Shame, and Secret Making explores more than one hundred years in the life of a single family, offering students and professionals invaluable insight into the consequences of prolonged narrative suppression in the social life of people. The book models a converging interdisciplinary approach to inquiry across specializations spanning traumatology, family therapy, psychology, psychiatry and social work. The model is consistent with an evolving paradigm of medical, public health and social service practice based on biopsychosocial evaluation of all patients.

Francis Joseph Harrington, MDiv, MEd, has spent more than three decades working closely with individuals and families adapting to stress, first as a priest in the Archdiocese of Toronto, and later as a staff psychologist in the department of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and as a school psychologist in Maryland.

Introduction: One Hundred and Thirty Years in a Family's Life Period I (1876 - 1913): When Men of Science Listened to a Woman's Terror 1: Pierre Janet's Inquiry into Hysteria 2: The Straw and the Camel's Back: Rose (1876 - 1942) 3: Disclosures of a Participant Observer Period II (1914 - 1945): When Men of War Listened to Each Other 4: Abram Kardiner's Inquiry into the Traumatic Neuroses of War 5: Rose and Her Children: Aileen (1910 - 1983) and Leonard (1914 - 1971) 6: Dreams of a Participant Observer Period III (1946 - 1979): When We Listened to Post-War Families and Their Children 7: The Inquiries of John Sigal and Salvador Minuchin Chapter 8: Aileen and her Children - Joseph (1948) and Mary Anne (1951 - 2007) 9: Abulia and the Moment of Truth for the Participant Observer Period IV (1980 - 1999): When We Named Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 10: The Inquiries of Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk 11: A Fourth Generation - Kat (1987) and Dimitri (1988) 12: Children and the Participant Observer Period V (2000 and Beyond): When Research Went Where We Had Not Dared Go 13: Michael Meaney, Eric Nestler, Michael Skinner and Epigenetics Chapter 14: Death by Entanglement 15: The Pitfall of the Participant Observer Part VI: From Mini-Inquiry to Mega-Investigation 16: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study 17: If Rose Answered the ACE Questions 18: Conclusions of the Participant Observer Afterword: Freud and Clergy Sexual Abuse