Victimized Daughters

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. Tracing the effects of idealization on the father-daughter relationship, the book explores the empathic attachment between the victim of incest and the perpetrator, especially the daughter's identification with the aggressor. Jacobs elaborates a theory of divided consciousness, which suggests that the daughter internalizes the identity of the powerful father, as well as a representation of the self as powerless victim. Within this framework, Jacobs explores patterns of revictimization and sexual development, placing them within a cultural analysis of sexual exploitation in contemporary society. Jacobs draws on feminist theories of personality development to explore the relationship between sexual trauma and the construction of the female self. With her focus on the significance of the father for female personality formation, she offers an original contribution to feminist theory. Jacobs looks at incest in its cultural context of a society were sexual violence and female objectification are prevalent. Illustrating how the abused daughter often takes on the role of the emotional caretaker to the abuser father, Jacobs defines this as an extreme manifestation of the cultural expectation that women be caretakers of men. She concludes with a discussion of the transformation through which the femaleself is reconstructed and reclaimed. Unique in its inclusion of survivors from diverse backgrounds and making a new tie between the study of incest and personality development, Victimized Daughters offers an original understanding of the female self within the context o