Discussion of Jonathan Sklar's “Violence, Destruction, and Survival; Regression at the level of the Basic Fault” 1

Jonathan Sklar's story of bears freed from captivity in Romania gives us a wonderful place to start. He poses: “How can a creature who has always lived in captivity begin to find mental and emotional freedom?” Like the bears, our traumatized patients continue to self-mutilate, physically and psychologically, beholden to bad internal objects or to simply not knowing how to be free. Similarly, the analyst's struggle to find freedom is not an easy one. We may be captive to theoretical models that narrow our thinking and inhibit our empathy, as well as to our internal objects and our past traumas. The deeply moving poem of Sklar's patient — Mrs. A — shows how the traumatic past stays with us and defies transformation, most clearly through its presence in the body. The not-past “are the hands that tear and claw,” that “envelop and smother,” that “pull the wings off the future.” The legacy of trauma saturates her sensory life as the dead continue to emit a “stench of decay” that “deflowers” her. Through finding such words, and finding a receptive other to hear them, Mrs. A gradually captures and transforms the texture of her trauma. Sklar's capacity to be used by Mrs. A allows this transformation to occur.

Sklar attempts an answer to the question of how to create a “traumatic narrative” with a patient, as opposed to nursing a continually suppurating wound. His ability to perceive the layers in his patient, the live color beneath the darkness, is essential to his staying present and connected, to maintaining empathy — what for Ferenczi was the essential quality in the analyst's stance. The description of Winnicott's young patient covering over bright colors with blackness brings to mind Rothko paintings, in which the starkness or dullness of surface color attracts us and moves us as we sense the thickness of layers present beneath. If we are not fooled by the darkness into thinking we are seeing the death instinct, Sklar cautions us, we can sense the roiling, unformed layer