In her twenty years as a clinical psychologist, Annie Rogers has learned to understand the silent language of girls who will not–who cannot–speak about devastating sexual trauma. Abuse too painful to put into words does have a language, though, a language of coded signs and symptoms that conventional therapy fails to understand. In this luminous, deeply moving book, Rogers reveals how she has helped many girls find expression and healing for the sexual trauma that has shattered their childhoods.
Rogers opens with a harrowing account of her own emotional collapse in childhood and goes on to illustrate its significance to how she hears and understands trauma in her clinical work. Years after her breakdown, when she discovered the brilliant work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Rogers at last had the key she needed to unlock the secrets of the unsayable. With Lacan’s theory of language and its layered associations as her guide, Rogers was able to make startling connections with seemingly unreachable girls who had lost years of childhood, who had endured the unspeakable in silence.
At the heart of the book is the searing portrait of the girl Rogers calls Ellen, brutally abused for three years by her teenage male babysitter. Over the course of seven years of therapy, Rogers helped Ellen find words for the terrible things that had happened to her, face up to the unconscious patterns through which she replayed the trauma, and learn to live beyond the shadows of the past. Through Ellen’s story, Rogers illuminates the complex, intimate unraveling of trauma between therapist and child, as painful truths and their consequences come to light in unexpected ways.
Like Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, The Unsayable is a book with the power to change the way we think about suffering and self-expression. For those who have experienced psychological trauma, and for those who yearn to help, this brave, compelling book will be a touchstone of lucid understanding and true healing.
In her twenty years as a clinical psychologist, Annie Rogers has learned to understand the silent language of girls who will not–who cannot–speak about devastating sexual trauma. Abuse too painful to put into words does have a language, though, a language of coded signs and symptoms that conventional therapy fails to understand. In this luminous, deeply moving book, Rogers reveals how she has helped many girls find expression and healing for the sexual trauma that has shattered their childhoods.
Rogers opens with a harrowing account of her own emotional collapse in childhood and goes on to illustrate its significance to how she hears and understands trauma in her clinical work. Years after her breakdown, when she discovered the brilliant work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Rogers at last had the key she needed to unlock the secrets of the unsayable. With Lacan’s theory of language and its layered associations as her guide, Rogers was able to make startling connections with seemingly unreachable girls who had lost years of childhood, who had endured the unspeakable in silence.
At the heart of the book is the searing portrait of the girl Rogers calls Ellen, brutally abused for three years by her teenage male babysitter. Over the course of seven years of therapy, Rogers helped Ellen find words for the terrible things that had happened to her, face up to the unconscious patterns through which she replayed the trauma, and learn to live beyond the shadows of the past. Through Ellen’s story, Rogers illuminates the complex, intimate unraveling of trauma between therapist and child, as painful truths and their consequences come to light in unexpected ways.
Like Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, The Unsayable is a book with the power to change the way we think about suffering and self-expression. For those who have experienced psychological trauma, and for those who yearn to help, this brave, compelling book will be a touchstone of lucid understanding and true healing.
From the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
A clinical psychologist, Rogers (A Shining Affliction) has spent 15 years researching girls and young women, and here she uses those case studies, along with her own experiences-part I details how, as a teenager, Rogers was treated for schizophrenia with weekly electroconvulsive therapy-to demonstrate how discovering the "unsayable" helps unlock the psyche of sexual abuse victims. Skeptical of the traditional therapy paradigm for treating sexual trauma, Rogers came to practice Lacanian psychoanalysis, which builds on "the logic of Freud's unconscious which links language, bodily symptoms, slips of the tongue and failed or incomplete acts-to 'say' things the conscious mind didn't want to know anything about." The second part delves into the Lacanian technique, examining its application in real-life subjects. Rogers goes in depth into several particularly disturbing and resonant cases-a multi-generational tragedy and a quartet of abusive victims among them-before returning to her own story, in which she came to believe she was Joan of Arc. Powerful and often tragic, Rogers conveys her stories with a poetic attention to words, making a compelling and heartbreaking case for the value of psychoanalysis and the restorative power of the human mind.
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From Booklist
Adolescent-onset schizophrenia with attendant delusions and dissociation landed a teenage Rogers in a locked ward of a mental hospital. For five months she did not speak, wordless in the face of her anguish. Today Rogers is a psychoanalyst who treats children traumatized as she was by using a structure for listening developed by the French -clinician-theorist Jacques Lacan in art and other expressive therapies. She bookends her report on him with her own experience of trauma, first regarded from the viewpoint of the hospitalized girl, then revisited from the perspective of that girl's present knowledge. In between she discusses imaginative play approaches and presents a number of traumatized children's cases. Her accounts of shock treatments with attendant losses of memory and skills, nightmares, and "messengers" (such as angel voices who sang to her when she was delusional) and gut-wrenching descriptions of her own and others' childhood molestations, body terrors, and ultimate disclosures ring with painful authenticity and immediacy and suggest that many more than professional readers may be enthralled by this worthy book. Whitney Scott
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