Back and Forth: A Structuralist Memoir

by David Winter

This memoir takes the form of a liberatory narrative describing the traumatic lives of children isolated by abusive parents and kept from speaking of the events affecting them throughout their childhood into adulthood. In response to this, it suggests that a critical context needs to be established for adult survivors of child abuse so that for this generation a clear articulation of these horrific events can be documented so their lessons are learned and future generations of children and parents will not have the secure base of their domestic spaces destroyed by the pathogen of violent adult behaviour. When a critical context for this kind of text is established it will allow survivors of domestic abuse to release the private hell of their secreted emotions into a normative public forum, whether through creative narrative or through criticism of depictions of child characters in English literature.
As is true with women drawn to the Feminist discourse, people of color drawn to the Postcolonial discourse, and gays and lesbians drawn to the Queer theory discourse, so it should be true of adult survivors of child the pain of private experience is made public and shared through its articulation in the forum of critical contextualization, where their narratives are engaged in university discursive practices with the same level of respect as those of individual members who emerge with narratives of alterity from these other groups.
In this way the narratives of adults who are survivors of childhood abuse would not be dissimilar to the Classic Slave Narratives of the 19th-century. Arguably, it will not be until such narratives are accepted within a critical context that domestic child abuse will remain as painful a cultural epidemic as the American slave trade of the 19th-century had been. As was true with the slave trade and the narratives it inspired, the domestic abuse of children will not stop until the narratives of those who have suffered from its effects have been fully articulated and given a critical context within the culture of public discourse outside of the abusive family. If such an effort worked to educate others and lessen the punishing effects of sexism, racism and homophobia, then it will also work to lessen the punishing effects in the lives of abused children and the damaged adults they become. According to Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, adults seeking medical help who knew adverse childhood experiences in their families of origin have a far higher rate of physical health maladies than those who did not, which, with the rocketing rates of healthcare costs, is at least one practical reason to encounter the issue of child abuse and neglect head on.
Most importantly, with the behavior of White Anglo-Saxon Patriarchs being at the heart of Critical Theories’ complaints, it is time to look past the assumption that Patriarchal aggression is solely founded on the capital system in which these men compete, and where it is felt that they project onto others all negative aspects of their characters when they fail to win. Indeed, rather than privileging their competitive skills, capitalism rewards the majority of men for their social skills of collaboration. As the work of psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn makes clear, human beings are not born with aggression as a phylogenetic inheritance, or as the Christian taint of Original Sin; instead, all human aggression is learned through the shaping behavior of parents or primary caregivers.

313 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 19, 2017

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Eleanor Cowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What canopy shelters the violated white kid who, by nature of his skin color and sex, gets linked to his Caucasian male oppressor? This riveting memoir opens up a much wider umbrella under which ALL can gather : Adult Children of Patriarchal Abuse. Detailing his father's unrestrained violence, compounded by his mother's chronic passivity, Winter names the consequences in psychological terms and then, amazingly, narrates a unique path to his personal autonomy. I learned so much!

Eleanor Cowan, author of : A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer

[Blogman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back and Forth is a courageous and insightful memoir about a taboo subject that is only recently being recognized and validated.

David Winter provides an inside view of a subject that has been traditionally shrouded in familial secrecy. As a childhood victim of years of severe physical abuse he grew up lacking the basic security of being safe in his home and protected by his parents. Back and Forth is a no holds barred account of the abuse and the subsequent consequences of the abuse in his adolescence, early adulthood and beyond. Mr Winter also chronicles his journey to try to come to terms with the abuse and to try live in the world as a functional and self-actualized human being despite the horrific circumstances of his upbringing. Unfortunately, unlike many other marginalized groups of people who ultimately gained a voice and recognition of their abuse, victims of childhood abuse by their caregivers have remained voiceless and unrecognized because the subject is taboo. As a child, his teachers, sports coaches and school officials could do little to help him and by default enabled his abusers. As an adolescent and an adult his siblings rejected his pleas for understanding. The academic community he encountered while doing post-graduate work to become a psychotherapist rejected out of hand, without any impartial, scholarly review, his research that sought to demonstrate that childhood abuse victims constitute a marginalized group of people not unlike other traditionally marginalized groups like Black people, Gay people or Women who ultimately did gain a voice. And in addition to their out of hand rejection they placed barriers in his path that made it all but impossible to complete his post-graduate work. Mr Winter wrote this courageous memoir, in part, as a therapeutic means to free himself from the demons of abuse by putting his struggle into words. He also wrote it in hopes that others in a similar situation might benefit from knowing that they are not alone and that what they went through is real, has a name, can be recovered from and that they are not at fault for what was done to them. He has since found work doing what he always wanted to do - teaching and he appears to be on a path towards exorcising the demons that have haunted him since he was a small boy.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir uses theoretical lenses to give context to the traumas it describes, with successive chapters poignantly recounting events from each year of the author’s life. By the time of its writing he received the training to understand his childhood abuse, using literary critical theory to qualify all child abuse as being equivalent in its injustice to that of the abuses endured by African American slaves. In this regard it is an account of his early traumas and eventual recovery from them, and an effort to reframe child abuse as a violation of human rights. Due to the traditional secrecy of abusive families, the author’s narrative works to challenge that silence to prevent parent-to-child violence in the future. For those who have suffered from child abuse and its effects, or who look for insight into anyone who has, this would be an excellent read.