Repetition and Working Through of Childhood Psychic Trauma in the Psychoanalytic Relationship: A Case History

This is a description of two analyses of George. The case illustrates how the patient's search for the development of self-structure was interrupted by a variety of traumas, with serious consequences to his personality. The two analyses were separated by an interval of 13 years. The first analysis failed, though not totally, because of my inability to understand a rapidly developing archaic idealizing selfobject transference. At the time of the first analysis I was still mainly influenced by the classical theory. I only encountered Kohut's first book, The Analysis of the Self, midway through this analysis and unfortunately at the time I experienced some resistances to the radical ideas it contained. By the time of the second analysis, I was conversant with self psychology and selfobject transference, and as a result this analysis was much more successful.

Trauma characterized George's childhood and adult life as well as both analyses. (George had also been in analysis prior to seeing me and again with another analyst after the first analysis with me.) When I first saw him, George was a junior civil servant aged 29. He presented as a rather obese, extremely self-effacing man who spoke in a stilted, even pedantic fashion. His major complaint was the meaninglessness of his life which was for him no more than a dreary routine. Years later he said, “I was anhedonic then, nothing but a zombie.” (It is interesting to note that Krystal (1978, 99) regards anhedonia as the most reliable “tag” of post-traumatic states) I also learned from George that he was