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Traumatic Ruptures: Abandonment and Betrayal is the most recent volume in Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris's Relational Perspectives Series. The book's chapters deal variously with “traumatic ruptures” in psychoanalytic treatment: the impact on an analysand of the analyst's death; the reaction of a therapist to a patient's suicide; and, most important, the
fallout for candidate patients and colleagues from a doctor's fall from grace. Indeed, this collection may well be the definitive volume when it comes to describing and analyzing the collateral damage done to training analysands, candidates, colleagues, and institutes caused by the sexual boundary violations of prominent analysts and by the institutional cover-ups that often ensue.
The linking of death and an analyst's fall from grace may seem counter intuitive. However, it makes sense when we consider our patients’ parent transferences in the context of the inevitable disillusionments encountered in what Erikson (1950) termed “the growth and crises of the healthy personality.” In this vein, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1987) reflected on two successive disappointments that inevitably come with growing up: “There are two crises which children face: one is in their youth when they find out that their parents are not as powerful as they thought; the second is in their adolescence when they find out that the parents are not as good as they thought they were” (p. 47).
When it comes to representations of our mothers and fathers, such “necessary losses,” to borrow a turn of phrase from the analytically trained writer Judith Viorst (1984), go hand in hand with emotional growth. In our own canon, following Freud's notion of “the ego” as the precipitate of forsaken object representations (1923), Mahler (1975) theorized that separation-individuation from the mother of symbiosis and the establishment of a bedrock sense of self in early childhood are in essence a mourning process. Subsequently, according to Erikson (1950) a