Freudian analyses of his patients’ hysteria—first, that hysteria resulted from actually experienced sexual assault, later retracted and restated that hysteria resulted from his patients’ unresolved illicit sexual fantasies—so influenced the course of psychology that a 1964 report by psychologists “conclud[ing] that marital violence fulfilled these women’s ‘masochistic needs’” (Herman, 1997, p. 117) continued to be a remarkably unchallenged explanation for the phenomena of the battered woman and her suffering—even after the American Psychiatric Association included posttraumatic stress disorder in the DSM-III. In response, feminist scholars in psychology began researching women’s traumatic sexual experiences systematically and found that, rather than “fulfilling women’s deepest desires,” rape was experienced by women as a “life-threatening event, … [one in which they] generally feared mutilation and death during the assault” (Herman, 1997, p. 31). After making the connection between women’s assessments and symptoms after rape, feminist psychologists built a case to redefine rape as “a crime of violence rather than a sexual act” (p. 30). Next came reframing domestic abuse and violence as crimes of violence. Researchers in the feminist movement collected the preponderance of social and physical evidence from women who were the victims of domestic abuse and made correlations to the scientific evidence gathered from VA studies on combat veterans in order to apply the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder for these homefront psychological casualties. In other words, the pattern of evidence systematically observed among traumatized veterans made it possible to see the same pattern of evidence among the women experiencing all types of domestic abuse.