Abstract
Rape victims have undergone an experience of extreme stress that is often sudden, unexpected, and felt to be life-threatening. Our working assumption is that rape arouses massive anxiety that produces a rupture of intrapsychic homeostasis. This in turn precipitates a painful and dysfunctional state of crisis (Golan, 1969, 1978). There are widely observed time-limited and phase-specific emotional and behavioral reactions described as the rape trauma syndrome (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1974a,b; Sutherland & Scherl, 1970). Indeed, the rape trauma syndrome is consistent with other gross stress syndromes and crisis reactions reported in the literature (Horowitz, 1976; Lindemann, 1944; Smith, 1978; Titchener & Kapp, 1976).
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© 1980 Plenum Press, New York
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McCombie, S.L., Arons, J.H. (1980). Counseling Rape Victims. In: McCombie, S.L. (eds) The Rape Crisis Intervention Handbook. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3689-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3689-1_11
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