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In order to situate Joseph Fernando's A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Trauma, one must comprehend how the term “trauma” has come to be used in mental health circles. This term has taken on a general characteristic that has become both diffuse and non-specific. “Everybody experiences trauma” has become a watchword as it is applied in many treatment settings. Even in psychoanalytic circles, this term has been discussed from several different vantage points varying in specificity. Greenberg (2019), for example, describes situations where analysts are seen as fearing the traumatization of patients via their interventions. He views the creation of object relations clinical approaches, which emphasize empathy, containment, and less interpretive methods as leading to the avoidance of interpreting conflictual issues that arise in the early childhoods of adult patients. In a slightly different view of this issue, Weiss (2022) describes an analysis of a traumatized patient who rejected treatment by forcefully negating all analytic interventions. This caused powerful countertransference responses for the analyst. Although the nature of this analytic impasse is explained in a less specific manner, the clinical situation was viewed from the vantage point of “toxic internal objects” that invaded the patient's mind and led to the disruption of the analytic process. Other authors have often viewed powerful
transference-countertransference impasses as the impediment to the analytic work (Brown, 2019; Sodré, 2019; Schneider, 2019).
Although the above authors can be seen as adding valuable contributions to this subject, Fernando is presenting a much more specific way of examining trauma based upon a very different theoretical approach to the subject. As per his earlier work on defenses (Fernando, 2009), the author describes three distinct, unconscious processes that govern psychoanalytic thinking. These are: Freud's primary process, secondary process, and what the author refers to