Trauma and its Aftermath

A conference on Trauma and Its Aftermath was held at Queen's College, Cambridge, on 6-8 April 1989 by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Psychotherapy Section, Dr Jon Sklar and Dr Andrew Powell organised a rigorous schedule of papers, small group and large group discussions for 140 people.

There were six speakers, Dr Earl Hopper, Dr Brendan MacCarthy, Dr John Alderdice, Mrs Caroline Garland, Dr Hanna Segal and Dr Brian Martindale, who gave papers on different aspects of trauma. Dr Hopper opened the conference with a paper entitled Social Trauma and Psychotic Anxieties; Massification/Aggregation, Fusion/Fragmentation. It was a challenging paper, and in our small group discussions many of us tried to understand his concepts and how they applied; but as Dr Dennis Brown pointed out in the plenary, by the end of the conference we all knew from experience what he had been talking about. We had witnessed in the Large Group the pressure towards massification and the backing away from this, that takes place within groups and within ourselves.

The Friday morning started with Dr MacCarthy giving us a paper on Child Abuse, a Social, Family and Individual Trauma, in which he conveyed the multi-generational factors in child abuse. Paradoxically he left us with the feeling that though child abuse runs like a fissure through the psyche, in the hands of one as skilled as Dr MacCarthy, some healing can take place. This was followed by Dr Alderdice's paper on The Psychopathology and Politics of Aids. He read us passages from Camus' The Plague and brought home to us all how difficult it is to think about Aids. What are the facts? What are the implications? How easily we all, as Camus pointed out, feel that it cannot happen to us.

In the afternoon we were given a paper by Mrs Garland, External Disaster and the Internal World - Consultation work with Survivors, in which she was able to convey to us all something of the suffocating and terrifying experience of two survivors from a recent di