Uncaging the Aggressor: Narrative-Identification in Work with an Obsessional Trauma Survivor

This article proposes a defense termed narrative-identification, an obsessive focus on generic narratives as stand-ins for historical human objects. The article provides a clinical illustration in which a female trauma survivor's masochistic obsession with predator-prey news stories insulated her from emotional spontaneity in her personal relationships, and concealed a core transference element in her work with me—that is, her fear of my becoming a sadistic aggressor. Rather than interacting with me, the patient interacted with her news stories, as if they were dominating, sadistic objects in their own right (termed here narrative-objects). It is asserted that the patient's identification with such deindividualized, abstract states as stand-ins for human objects mitigated a sense of assault from her sadistic historical objects and facilitated her avoidance of engaging with projective-introjective processes in the transference. This type of identification with abstract states is categorized as nonpenetrating (identifications that do not stimulate introjection of aspects of the other) and is based on the following assumption: the less individualized the object of identification, the more schizoid the psychological functioning of the subject. A turning point in the treatment occurred when the patient expressed her fear of my spoken thoughts, which might suddenly and without warning introduce new topics from which she would feel compelled to create sadistic narrative-objects. This made clear my underlying transference role as a passively sadistic object, the patient's historical mother. Such a realization began the transformation of the patient's generic narrative-objects into an enlivened personal narrative that housed a central historical object—her sadistic mother with whom I was linked in the transference.