Consistent failure over the past few decades to reduce the high prevalence of stress-related disorders has motivated a search for alternative research strategies. Resilience refers to the phenomenon of many people maintaining mental health despite exposure to psychological or physical adversity. Instead of aiming to understand the pathophysiology of stress-related disorders, resilience research focuses on protective mechanisms that shield people against the development of such disorders and tries to exploit its insights to improve treatment and, in particular, disease prevention.

Abstract

This article addresses the tension in psychoanalytic thinking regarding adult-onset trauma and its potential effects on children who were not directly exposed to the same parental trauma. Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes early attachment trauma as predictive of the response to trauma later in life. This emphasis on early trauma delayed recognition of adult-onset trauma-related disorders and the development of adequate trauma-focused treatments.

Efforts to better understand sexual victimization experiences among male populations have been chiefly absent (Spataro, Moss, & Wells, 2001; Stermac, Sheridan, Davidson, & Dunn, 1996). ). Research indicates that approximately 1 in 71 men in the United States (i.e., 1.6 million men) have been raped in their lifetime, and nearly 1 in 5 men (i.e., 25 million men) have experienced sexual victimization other than rape in their lifetime (Black, Basile, Breiding, Smith, Walters, Merrick, Chen, & Stevens, 2011).