Victim

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘victim’ operates along several intersecting axes that resist reduction to any single theoretical frame. Judith Herman’s foundational work treats victimhood as a politically charged clinical category: the victim is systematically discredited, rendered invisible, or subjected to victim-blaming precisely because acknowledging traumatic reality threatens the social order that produces it. Herman traces how coercive captivity reshapes the victim’s psychology from within—restructuring identity, distorting attachment, and generating apparent passivity that observers then misread as moral failure. Peter Levine’s somatic perspective reframes the victim’s immobility and helplessness as biologically adaptive responses to overwhelming threat, insisting that the immobilized body is not a weak character but a nervous system executing ancient survival programs. The Adult Children of Alcoholics literature identifies a distinct phenomenology of the ‘victim stance’—a chronic relational posture transmitted across generations that paradoxically functions as a mechanism of control. Von Franz and Campbell locate the victim in mythological deep structure, where the first victim is the slain chaos-being whose death is the precondition of creation itself—a cosmogonic pattern that recurs from Tiamat through Purusha to the willing sacrificial god. The central tensions in the corpus are thus: victim as social construction versus biological fact; victim as passive sufferer versus active agent of meaning; and victim identity as wound requiring healing versus as archetype organizing collective existence.

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In situations of captivity, the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.

Herman argues that captivity fundamentally restructures the victim’s psyche around the perpetrator’s will, making victimhood a systematically induced psychological condition rather than a pre-existing disposition.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis

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Observers who have never experienced prolonged terror and who have no understanding of coercive methods of control presume that they would show greater courage and resistance than the victim in similar circumstances. Hence the common tendency to account for the victim’s behavior by seeking flaws in her personality or moral character.

Herman demonstrates that victim-blaming arises from observers’ ignorance of coercive psychology, not from actual character defects in survivors.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis

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It is not possible to create something without destroying something else at the same time… the Chinese, especially the Taoist philosophers, have therefore quite rightly stressed creation as a sort of murder, the murder of a kind and innocent being.

Von Franz establishes the ‘first victim’ as a universal cosmogonic figure whose sacrificial destruction is the precondition for the emergence of world and consciousness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis

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Violence is but one among an array of methods that a perpetrator uses to establish domination over a victim. Others include using threats, control of bodily functions, capricious enforcement of petty rules… These methods break down normal capacities for self-regulation, autonomy, and initiative; they humiliate the victim and undermine the victim’s closest relationships.

Courtois extends Herman’s framework by cataloguing the multi-modal coercive apparatus through which perpetrators systematically dismantle the victim’s autonomy and relational world.

Courtois, Christine A, Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults) thesis

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The sense that the perpetrator is still present, even after liberation, signifies a major alteration in the victim’s relational world. The enforced relationship during captivity, which of necessity monopolizes the victim’s attention, becomes part of the victim’s inner life and continues to engross her attention after release.

Herman describes the internalization of the perpetrator as an enduring psychic presence that persists in the victim’s inner life long after physical liberation.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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These are precisely the arguments that rapists invoke to blame the victim or justify the rape. The survivor cannot come to a fair assessment of her own conduct until she clearly understands that no action on her part in any way absolves the rapist of responsibility for his crime.

Herman shows that self-blame in rape survivors replicates the perpetrator’s own logic, making the internalization of victim-blaming a secondary dimension of the trauma itself.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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We live life from the viewpoint of victims, and we are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships… By living as victims or with victim characteristics, adult children seek to control others and ward off

The ACA model reframes victim identity as a paradoxical relational strategy transmitted from dysfunctional family systems, functioning simultaneously as wound and as covert mechanism of interpersonal control.

INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012thesis

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that willing victim in whose death is our life, whose flesh is our meat and blood our drink; the victim present in the young embracing couple of the primitive ritual of the love-death, who at the moment of ecstasy are killed, to be sacramentally roasted and consumed

Campbell identifies the willing sacrificial victim as the structural center of a cross-cultural mythological pattern in which destruction and life-renewal are inseparably conjoined.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting

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rape victims often experience an intense feeling of helplessness and loss of control… A stranger makes a very quick intimate contact and inserts an instrument into the vagina with very little control or decision-making on the part of the victim; that is a symbolic setup of a psychological re-rape.

Herman illustrates how inadequate clinical procedure can replicate the structure of victimization, thereby compounding rather than treating the original trauma.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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I can help to get her ready to meet life on life’s terms so that she can make use of opportunities without sabotaging them… always being the victim, which is, in fact, keeping her a victim.

Dayton argues that the entrenched victim life-script is self-perpetuating, actively blocking the relational repair and resilience that therapeutic work aims to restore.

Dayton, Tian, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Lasting Fulfillment, 2007supporting

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Though the abuser is often sincere in his promise to give up the use of force, his promise is hedged with implicit conditions; in return for his pledge of nonviolence, he expects his victim to give up her autonomy.

Herman exposes the structural asymmetry of domestic abuse: the perpetrator’s apparent reform conceals an unchanged demand for the victim’s subjugation.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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this argument offers little comfort to the victim who feels completely humiliated by his helplessness. Even the feeling of outrage no longer preserves his dignity, for it has been bent to the will of his enemies and turned against the person he loves.

Herman traces how captivity corrupts the victim’s own moral emotions, turning outrage inward and against loved ones, thus deepening shame and self-alienation.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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it is present in the ‘beast of sacrifice’—the victim roped to the sacrificial post and about to be slaughtered. That one being is the offerer, the offering, and the implements of the offering—the all-pervading, universally vivifying, omnipresent principle of phenomenal existence.

Zimmer presents the Hindu cosmogonic vision in which the sacrificial victim is not merely passive recipient but the very substance of existence, collapsing distinctions between sacrificer, offered, and divine recipient.

Zimmer, Heinrich, Philosophies of India, 1951supporting

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the victim brought about his own death by his mistake: it is not our doing (ergon), the speaker argues, but that of the boy who did not look where he was running.

Williams documents an ancient Greek forensic argument that relocates causal responsibility for death onto the victim, illuminating the deep cultural genealogy of victim-blaming.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993aside

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the stag, who is usually her favorite animal, is in this case her victim. This is a highly problematic formulation.

Giegerich critically interrogates the application of the victim category to mythological transformation, arguing that Artemis’s relationship to the stag exceeds the perpetrator-victim schema entirely.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside

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Janet spoke of the person’s need to ‘assimilate’ and ‘liquidate’ traumatic experience, which, when accomplished, produces a feeling of ‘triumph.’ In his use of language, Janet implicitly recognized that helplessness constitute

Herman invokes Janet’s formulation to suggest that overcoming victim helplessness through mastery of traumatic memory is the telos of the recovery process.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992aside

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