Paul Richard Abramson (born December 24, 1949, in Norwalk, Connecticut) is a UCLA psychology professor, expert witness, author, and musician.
Abramson was also a visiting professor of psychology at Kyoto University in Japan in 1983, Editor of the Journal of Sex Research from 1988 to 1992, and Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS in 1991.
He employed methods – mathematical models, narrative theories, constitutional scholarship, archival research, epidemiology, psychological interviews, ethnography, the philosophy of aesthetics – that suited the conundrums he grappled with.
Though Kinsey conducted research on the way Americans expressed their sexuality, and Masters & Johnson did the same for the underlying physiology, Abramson and Mosher extended this line of work by introducing psychological variables into the mix, guilt in particular.
To further this area of inquiry, Abramson also created at UCLA the first class in the United States devoted to the study of the interface between sex and the law, as it relates to criminal, civil, and constitutionally relevant litigation.
Though Americans have grown accustomed to the enormity of childhood sexual abuse through its depiction in newspapers, novels, memoirs and movies, this was not the case in 1984.
When the Los Angeles Times reviewed the book shortly after publication, it remarked, “How can so much intimate, destructive violence be part of our here and now, almost before our eyes?
No novelist would dare, because fiction can neither resolve, nor even make reasonable, this material.” Abramson continued to write about the impact of childhood sexual abuse, most notably the nation's largest child pornography case which involved over 3000 images of children, discovered at the home of the director of a prominent preschool.
Another book he wrote about this subject matter, with co-author Steven Pinkerton (a psychiatry professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin), is A House Divided: Suspicions of mother-daughter incest.
The book details a child sexual molestation case (drawn from his three decades of serving as an expert witness in civil and criminal litigation) gone shockingly awry, and concludes with recommendations for policy changes to minimize false accusations.
Composed almost entirely of still photographs with voice-over narration, Regret is My Demon tells the story of a teenage girl who blames herself for her mother's heroin addiction and untimely death.
Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962), Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977–1982) are obvious influences.
Abramson's drawings illustrate two books, The Saint of Fucked Up Karma[3] (2017) and Erika Blair's The Sanctity of Rhyme: The Metaphysics of Crying 4 Kafka[4] (2018).