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Two things struck me most in reading Psychic Reality in Context: Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, Personal History, and Trauma: first, Marion Oliner's personal resiliency; second, the soundness of her theoretical and clinical thinking integrated with her own experience. This slim volume qualifies as a primer on trauma, discussing as it does the central controversies in the field. Oliner has a very specific point of view worthy of close attention.
Oliner, born in Germany before World War II, suffered a series of dislocations and indignities culminating in the loss of her immediate family. She devotes her second prologue to a personal narrative titled “Excuse Me for Having Been Born: The Fate of a German Jew during the Second World War.” Recounting her personal history before and during the war, she writes with the objective eye of a psychoanalyst and with characteristic candor, recollecting how she coped and protected herself emotionally as she underwent terrifying and humiliating experiences. For instance, when marching with a convoy of refugee children on the way to Switzerland, the twelve-year-old Marion slipped and fell into some bushes. She overheard the woman leader of the group tell her husband to leave her behind. He went back to rescue her anyway, and she made it to safety. Oliner's description conveys both her immense suffering and the appalling injustice of her circumstances.
In her quest to master her childhood losses, Oliner has been drawn to the subject of trauma, in both theory and clinical practice. On the theoretical side, she describes the prototypical traumatic situation as one in which the demands of reality temporarily override operation of the pleasure principle. A number of factors determine the severity of a person's reaction to a potentially traumatic situation: level of maturity at the time of the occurrence; the emotional intensity of the events; whether the situation needs to be kept secret or whether there are corroborating witnesses. Anothe