My Life is a Longing: Child Abuse and its Adult Sequelae

Henry Massie and Nathan Szajnberg

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 87:471-496, 2006

Ten children in the Lives Across Time study suffered severe maltreatment in childhood. As adults they had significantly more psychiatric illness (typically joylessness, depression and anxiety), less mature psychological defense mechanisms, more insecure mental representations of attachment to their parents, and impaired overall functioning compared to well-treated children in the study. Several of the maltreated children were relatively successful adults, however their resilience came at the price of emotional vulnerability and compromised potential.