How can someone forget an event as traumatic as sexual abuse in childhood? people who don't know firsthand may wonder, and many apparently do, or controversy wouldn't be raging around the issue of recovered memories today. This book lays bare the logic of forgotten abuse. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd's breakthrough theory explaining this phenomenon shows how psychogenic amnesia not only happens but, if the abuse occurred at the hands of a parent or caregiver, is often necessary for survival.

What Freyd describes, with cogent real-life examples, is "betrayal trauma," a blockage of information that would otherwise interfere with one's ability to function within an essential relationship - that of parent and dependent child, for instance.