Healing Sexually Betrayed Boys and Men

Last year I reviewed a manuscript for Routledge and in exchange for my labours took my remuneration in books, including a copy of this book: Richard B. Gartner, Healing Sexually Betrayed Men and Boys: Treatment for Sexual Abuse, Assault, and Trauma (Routledge, 2018). 

It is the second volume, a companion to Understanding the Sexual Betrayal of Boys and Men: The Trauma of Sexual Abuse (Routledge, 2017).

I have not read the 2017 volume, but on the strength of the second, I will be doing so.

Healing Sexually Betrayed Men and Boys is a very rich collection, only some of which I can hope to convey here. It certainly belongs in the hands of every man or boy who has been victimized, but will be equally valuable to their partners and family members, and of course to clinicians of all traditions. There is a great deal of solid research conveyed here as well as some pioneering programs, and reflections of those pioneering clinicians themselves. 

The book is divided into four sections, with a total of fifteen chapters. Most are written by US clinicians, but several are written by clinicians in Canada, including one, Rick Goodwin, based in Ottawa, where I did my initial training in psychology and underwent psychoanalysis. So his chapter was of special interest to me.

The first section looks at general and global issues in treating men who have been abused. The second looks at focused treatments, including a new program, Weekend of Recovery, and a resource-rich website to which it is connected, MaleSurvivor.org. The third section, "Women in the Picture," looks at female therapists working with male survivors as well as female partners of the same; there is also a section on same-sex partners and their unique challenges. In this section also is a chapter on covert seduction, about which more in a moment. 

The fourth and final section is a rare look at perpetrators who are also survivors/victims, and the very great difficulties that arise when trying to find placements for such men to be treated. I will return to this again later. Each section, and nearly every chapter, also contains often harrowing case material of patients the authors have treated over the years. 

Let me just highlight three chapters while, again, encouraging all those with interest in this area to read the whole book. 

The fourth chapter, co-authored by Howard Fradkin and Jim Struve, "Empowering Male Survivors to Heal through Community and Peer Connections," contains a new model that I have found fascinating. Based on their belief that group work is a crucial adjunct to individual psychotherapy, the authors proposed, plan, and have helped host Weekends of Recovery around the world since 2001. "While not considered therapy, the weekends often have therapeutic benefits," the authors say (102). In this regard, A good bit of the underlying philosophy, they say, comes from that landmark book we all know and love, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom and Molyn Leszcz; their sixth edition was published just a month ago. There is much here, it seems to me, that would lend itself to Catholic churches borrowing and adapting for similar purposes as parishes and victims try to heal from the never-ending abuse in their midst, which I have addressed at length elsewhere. 

Chapter 11, "Covert Seduction and its Effect on Boys and Men," by Kenneth Adams is deeply interesting, raising a concept I have never heard before: covert seduction, where boys are used emotionally and sexually without actual physical sexual contact in most cases: "you can be sexually abused without being sexually touched" (214). One example of this he focuses on later in the chapter is exposure to pornography, especially at an early age. Other examples include bathing and toilet rituals as well as expecting boys to fulfill emotional and sexual needs of their mothers in the absence, or as rivals to, husbands and fathers. 

The damage this can leave is very real, serious, and long-lasting in many cases, resulting in guilt, schizoid-like detachment, shame, ongoing struggles to detach from the covertly incestuous family member, etc. In therapy, Adams cautions several times, these victims will often be the ideal patients--docile, compliant, reporting positive effects and results. All this is in fact a sign of their pathology: they have learned compliance, docility, and the importance of manifesting positive results as a result of their abuse. 

The last section is useful in highlighting some of the challenges that come from men who were themselves victims before going on to be perpetrators. The authors cite research indicating that this number is much lower than is sometimes portrayed, suggesting it is around 12% of abuse victims who go on to become perpetrators (a number borrowed from Anna Salter's very useful groundbreaking book Predators). Additionally this section contains a helpful typology of abusers, and a section of female abusers as well. 

All told, Richard Gartner and his contributors to Healing Sexually Betrayed Men and Boys: Treatment for Sexual Abuse, Assault, and Trauma have given us many insights (each chapter's lengthy bibliography is very valuable indeed) in this rich and helpful book. I know I shall be returning to it regularly. 

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man--Again: Erich Fromm

I'm working feverishly to get an essay done before month's end for a project at Cambridge University on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, about which last year I published Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, which drew extensively on psychoanalytic thought.

For my current project I'm going beyond what I wrote last year thanks to a re-immersion in thought of Erich Fromm, to whom I will return again on this blog, but some of whose books I wanted to draw to your attention even now. I think he's perhaps more relevant than at any time since the 1940s when he made his breakout into the anglophone world. 

March 2020 passed--for obvious reasons--without much attention being given to the fact that it marked both the 120th anniversary of the birth, and the 40th anniversary of the death, of Erich Fromm (23 March 1900–18 March 1980). He was wildly popular for much of his life, his books regularly selling millions of copies and being read or quoted by popes and presidents and policy-makers, inter alia. If anyone demonstrated the sociopolitical uses of psychoanalytic thought, well beyond the consulting room, it was and is Fromm. 

Today what he may lack in popularity he more than makes up for in ongoing relevance, not least to the politics of these United States but also, as I will soon suggest elsewhere, the politics of the Catholic Church. In some ways we need to return to his thought now more than ever for his insights into the problems of power, authority, freedom, and submission remain perennially relevant. 

I bought his Escape from Freedom in the mid-1990s in a cramped used bookstore down the street from my psychoanalyst in Ottawa, where I was an undergraduate student in psychology at the time. That book, Fromm's first of many runaway best-sellers when it came out in 1941, has never left me, and within the past couple of years has come to inform my thinking more and more, aided in part by some similar themes in Adam Phillips. 

Like most of Fromm's books, Escape from Freedom was written in a rather loose, breezy, and, if you will, "popular" style, which goes some way to explaining why, as his most perceptive biographer Lawrence Friedman has shown, he was largely ignored at least by North American academics. 

But, says Friedman--who has been reading and writing about Fromm since the late 1950s--the 1941 book was and is “the deepest and most important of Fromm’s books.” 

I would not dissent from that, but only put in a bid to claim that his posthumously published 1981 book On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying “No” to Power is a crucial, and more concrete, "second volume" if you will to the 1941 book. It is a very short book, but what it lacks in length it makes up for in more concrete and pointed insights, it seems to me, than those found in Escape from Freedom. 


In addition to these two books, I have for the first time just finished Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. It is an extremely wide-ranging book, but its sections on sadism and masochism are especially valuable. I will return to this S&M theme in the coming days with some further thoughts on Fromm and also on an outstanding collection, Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly (NYU Press, 1995).