Identificatory Processes in Trauma
Identification is not only an important developmental process. It can also serve as this.
What is a mechanism of defense (in order to maintain psychic equilibrium)?
The inability to suffer pain means the inability to also “suffer” this.
What is joy?
Borne abruptly from a shared traumatic event, this type of group links individuals who may have been only loosely associated beforehand.
What is an Adversity Group?
According to Freud, this is based on our earliest memory traces of our earliest identifications.
What is character?
According to Klein, external reality being able to modify internal reality is one criterion of this.
What is one criterion of normality?
In any traumatized group, this is the individual’s task.
What is to struggle to put into words what has happened both internally and externally?
During mourning, identification with the lost object serves this function.
What is identification as a defense against the trauma of loss?
Bion calls this experience “nameless dread.”
What is the experience of one’s anxieties reprojected by mother rather than contained?
In an Adversity Group, this is the therapist’s first task.
What is to help members accept and tolerate that they are in fact, a group?
Excessive use of this defence causes a depletion of the self and a rigidity of character.
What is projection?
Adverse experiences diminish trust and confirm anxieties about these internal states.
What are annihilation and persecution?
This is the most powerful container for a Given Group.
What is the effective carrying out of the group’s primary task?
In early life, the absent object becomes the impetus for the development of these.
What are thought and mental space?
Sometimes patients say they want therapy to gain understanding when what they really want is this.
What is the therapist’s help to restore the original defensive structure?
This effort on the part of the group is itself part of the treatment.
What is to communicate to the therapist what happened during the traumatic event?