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As clinicians we want to further our understanding of work with adult clients who have experienced massive and cumulative psychic trauma to which there is no possible adaptive response strategy.
We want to explore the means by which individuals struggle to cope with exposure to war zones, both in the conditions of large-scale conflicts and societal breakdown, as well as the domestic war zones where adults and children experience violence and sexual abuse. We also seek to further our understanding of how these experiences of trauma get transmitted intergenerationally, as in the examples of the Holocaust and slavery.
Experience shows us that survival, past and present, is a moment by moment struggle; powerful affectual storms often dysregulate and freeze the therapeutic dyad, while disjointed physical enactments offer hints of a hidden narrative. The body and mind of therapist and client alike are possessed by the trauma. It can feel impossible to think in an atmosphere where the dissociated landscapes of the past are recreated.
Present reality becomes distorted and denied. Oppressive experiences, disowned by perpetrators, are re-enacted and relived in the analytic space. Client and therapist alike struggle to find meaning and relief from the agony of non-recognition by the other.
Creative exploration gives way to compulsion and seeming lack of choice. Feelings of hatred, colonization, constriction of self and other, threaten to overwhelm. Re-enactments are at times mutually painful and life threatening. The struggle for life or death that prevailed historically for the client becomes the currency of the here and now. Madness and sanity become confused in the battle for subjectivity.
These are relationships in which the pressure for survival envelops the therapeutic dyad and takes it to the edge of experience, theoretically and technically, often to the edge of legitimacy in the current psychoanalytic framework. This is work against the odds, where hope perhaps lies in bot