Victimized Daughters - Janet Liebman Jacobs

In Victimized Daughters Janet Liebman Jacobs offers an important contribution to the understanding of sexual trauma. Drawing on interviews with fifty incest survivors from a range of ethnic, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, she examines the effects of incest on the personality formation of victimized daughters, particularly the role the incestuous father plays in the process.

Janet Liebman Jacobs is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Divine Disenchantment: Deconverting From New Religions and her work has appeared in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, SIGNS: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, Sociological Analysis, and Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion.

"This searching, groundbreaking work on incest survivors examines the role that abusive fathers take in the formation of the female self. Jacobs provides new insights into mother-blame, empathic connection between victim and perpetrator, identification with the aggressor, and divided consciousness, illustrating points with the voices of survivors interviewed in her study. Utilizing feminist interpretations of Freudian psychology and the self in relation theorists, Jacobs formulates critical new ideas about the distortions that characterize the development of the empathic female self within the context of sexual violence." -- Dana Crowley Jack, author of Silencing the Self: Women and Depression
"I highly recommend this remarkable book because it extends and deepens our understanding of the concrete ways in which the traumatic imprint of incest shapes women's experience of their bodies, the dynamics of psychosexual development, destructive patterns of family and social relations, and the construction of gender identities." -- Patricia P. Rieker, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
"The benefit and honest contribution of this work is its integration of the developmental perspective and explanation of self-development to the recovery process...The book could be used successfully by self-help groups because of its clarity and organization...Victimized Daughters can inform public discussions of incest and it sets forth a valuable integration of theories that will provide sound footing for the next levels of research, policy, and service development for threatment of incest survivors." -- Families in Society