In recent years, popular psychology has talked a lot about people being victims of various traumatic experiences. More recently, however, the term “victim” has been replaced by “survivor”. For an individual to make this transition it is crucial that he or she can make a testimony about his or her suffering. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is such an outbreak of memoirs that detail trauma and survival.

In the past couple of months alone at least five books have appeared on The Times bestseller list that describe horrible childhoods. The writers depict their upbringing as resembling torture in concentration camps; uniformly, they speak of encountering “evil” and depict themselves as survivors of a particular new form of Holocaust called home. In these new times of anxiety, the evil figures we fear are not simply obscure terrorists, but most of all our compatriots: especially the people closest to us — our families.

Richard Pelzer — brother of Dave, whose first book, A Child Called ‘It’, was one of the first examples of the genre — in his memoir A Brother’s Journey writes about the way his mentally unstable mother tortured her five sons and reveals that he himself sometimes acted like a “Little Hitler” when he helped his mother to punish his older brother Dave. But when this nameless child — kept in a cellar and treated like a wild animal — was put in a foster home, Richard took the place of the outcast and was constantly humiliated by his mother.

Jane Elliot’s The Little Prisoner is described as a “heart-rending and inspirational story of a girl who bravely triumphs over evil”. As a four-year-old girl, Jane encountered evil in the form of her mother’s young lover who emotionally and physically abused Jane for 17 years until she was finally able to press charges against him. Kevin Lewis, in his new memoir Moving On, says that he wrote the first account of his abusive childhood, The Kid, as an attempt to exorcise his past. However, he did not succeed in this: his memories continued to haunt him, and his mother Gloria started abusing other children in the same way as she had abused him. Judith Kelly talks about evil in her memoir Rock Me Gently when she describes how she was put into a Catholic orphanage where she was subjected to brutal physical and psychological abuse. Richard McCann in the book Just a Boy writes about the reign of terror which dominated his childhood after his mother was murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper and he went to live with his drunken and violent father.

Why are so many people writing about their horrible childhoods and why are there so many readers of these memoirs? Writers of these books often say that they simply needed to tell the truth; that they wanted to express their feelings in order to be set free from it all; and that, most of all, they want to help others who suffered abuse to stop feeling ashamed or guilty. They also hope to prevent today’s children from having their childhood stolen by abusive adults.

Now it is almost forgotten how the fashion of recovered memory therapy about a decade ago opened so many legal suits against parents after people suddenly remembered that they were abused as children. In the early 1990s, Binjamin Wilkomirski became famous with his memoir Fragments, which described, in searing detail, his childhood in a Nazi concentration camp. This memoir was later revealed to be false: Wilkomirski had never lived even near the camps.

While these examples present extremes of how some people find particular enjoyment in presenting themselves as victims, they nonetheless mark a particular trend regarding today’s perception of trauma. The idea is that a person has to remember the original trauma, express it — and then the suffering will be alleviated.

It is well known that Freud insisted that there is no direct correlation between trauma and event. Many people can experience an event, but only some will develop a trauma linked to it; it is also possible that the event never happened, but the trauma is nonetheless formed. When analysing the link between trauma and an event, Freud also pointed out that the most traumatic for the subject is not the fact that an event actually happened, but that the subject did not anticipate it — was not prepared for it. He takes the example of a train crash. Someone who survived the accident might only later develop a trauma about it and become, for example, haunted by the accident in his or her dreams. By creating an anxiety, these dreams try to make up for the lack of preparedness at the time of the accident, since for Freud it is precisely the anxiety preparedness that presents the last shield from the shock. It is when this preparedness is lacking that the event results in a trauma.

Freud says that: “An individual will have made an important advance in his capacity for self-preservation if he can foresee and expect a traumatic situation of this kind which entails helplessness, instead simply waiting for it to happen.” When we have been traumatised by some event and are afterwards anxious that something horrible might happen again, we are actually hoping that our anxiety will present a protective shield from further damage.

While it is easy to agree with the writers of these memoirs that the very act of writing helped them to deal with their past traumas in a new way, the question remains what kind of enjoyment readers get out of these accounts of abuse. One can speculate that some readers find pleasure in being voyeurs who enjoy watching the new types of “reality show” that these memoirs present. Some might find solace that their lives have been easier; others might feel anxious that they themselves might be perceived as torturers by their own children.

In times of high anxiety, guilt is always on the rise. We should not forget that our society idealises the role of the family and especially creates the myth of the perfect mother. Idealised figures can, however, quickly become perceived as evil.

Renata Salecl is Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Her most recent book is On Anxiety (Routledge)

Read on

• Rock Me Gently by Judith Kelly (Bloomsbury)
• The Little Prisoner by Jane Elliott (Element)
• The Privilege of Youth by Dave Pelzer (Penguin)
• Moving On by Kevin Lewis (Michael Joseph)
• A Brother’s Journey by Richard Pelzer (Time Warner)
• Just a Boy by Richard McCann (Ebury)
• Danny’s Challenge by Danny Mardell (Short Books)
• Behind Closed Doors by Jenny Tomlin (forthcoming, Hodder)
• Heartland by Neil Cross (forthcoming, Scribner) Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne (forthcoming, Mainstream)

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