SUMMARY :
Traumatic consequences caused by a sexual abuse are, obviously, different according
to the type of abuse and to the link between the victim and the agressor (family
member, relatives, unknown person).
Whatever the differencies, the zero degree of gravity doesn’t exist and
the felt suffuring is absolute, not relative (more serious/less serious, more
violent/less violent…).
When these patients come to ask our help in sexology, pushed by a sexual symptom,
that will mean to lead them to build (or rebuild) themselves working on two
axes : the shame one and the culpability one.
Shame, shame of the soiled body, of the "objectised" body, the body
that could not prevent itself from the agression; itís the shame of impotence,
of the inability to defend the integrity of this body.
Culpability is culpability of being, partly at least, responsible for what happened,
of being the "bad" : compromising situation, attitude, way of dressing,
etc. in response of the question : "What did I do to deserve that?"
Shame and culpability bring the victim into a breaking of the links with its
own body and with the social body. Law is the first step on the way of the restauration
of this link :
- one knows the virtue of a trial, if it takes place, that recognizes officially
the victim as a victim,
- in all the other cases, saying the law, in the space of this special relation
said therapeutic, permits to start the separation, to set the limit between
guilty and victim, agressor and agressed, good and bad, right and wrong.
Before being able to make it up again with the body, the first recovering are
made with the social body.