#i'm aware linda lovelace's situation is a thorny subject and herman's attitude towards it is really trenchant

[girlonthelasttrain]

Prolonged captivity also produces profound alterations in the victim’s identity. All the psychological structures of the self—the image of the body, the internalized images of others, and the values and ideals that lend a person a sense of coherence and purpose—have been invaded and systematically broken down. In many totalitarian systems this dehumanizing process is carried to the extent of taking away the victim’s name. [Jacobo] Timerman calls himself a “prisoner without a name.” In concentration camps the captive’s name is replaced with a nonhuman designation, a number. In political or religious cults and in organized sexual exploitation, the victim is often given a new name to signify the total obliteration of her previous identity and her submission to the new order. Thus Patricia Hearst was rebaptized Tania, the revolutionary; Linda Boreman was renamed Linda Lovelace, the whore. Even after release from captivity, the victim cannot assume her former identity. Whatever new identity she develops in freedom must include the memory of her enslaved self. Her image of her body must include a body that can be controlled and violated. Her image of herself in relation to others must include a person who can lose and be lost to others. And her moral ideals must coexist with knowledge of the capacity for evil, both within others and within herself. If, under duress, she has betrayed her own principles or has sacrificed other people, she now has to live with the image of herself as an accomplice of the perpetrator, a “broken” person. The result, for most victims, is a contaminated identity. Victims may be preoccupied with shame, self-loathing, and a sense of failure. In the most severe cases, the victim retains the dehumanized identity of a captive who has been reduced to the level of elemental survival: the robot, animal, or vegetable. The psychiatrist William Niederland, in studies of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, observed that alterations of personal identity were a constant feature of the “survivor syndrome.” While the majority of his patients complained, “I am now a different person,” the most severely harmed stated simply, “I am not a person.”

— Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

#well! #i should've reread this book sooner #reading journal #trauma and recovery #judith herman #i'm aware linda lovelace's situation is a thorny subject and herman's attitude towards it is really trenchant