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Soili Haaramo and Kirsti Palonen have done a great job editing the book The Many Faces of Trauma, published by the Therapeia Foundation. The editors have collected nine essays by ten authors, most of them known from their work with traumatized patients. The objective of the book is to ‘open up views into the inner world of the traumatized patient, through which he also interprets the outer reality’. This autumn the theme of the book has gained tragic actuality in Finland through a bombing at the Myyrmanni shopping center in which seven people where killed. Everyday we hear in the news of new tragic developments in the Middle East. Trauma has been the topic of many psychoanalytic conferences in the last few years, as evidenced in the plenary session on the topic of psychic trauma at The XII IFPS Forum of Psychoanalysis in Oslo or the panel discussion on ‘Working with traumatized people’ at the 42nd International IPA Congress on Psychoanalysis in Nice last year.
The editors have collected essays on different aspects on psychic trauma and how to deal with it. The essays cover topics like separation, loss, sexual abuse, paedophilia, death and bodily illness. Though almost all of the essays have a psycho-analytic/psychodynamic frame of reference some of the papers present also other kinds of theories and therapies. In this review I will present some of the essays included in the book, which I personally found interesting.
The book opens up with an essay written by Mona Serenius, well known to the readers as the managing editor of this journal. The evacuation of Finnish children to Sweden during the Second World War and the traumatic consequences of this is the subject of the paper. Mona Serenius, who was evacuated herself, has previously published a paper on the topic in this journal titled ‘The Silent Cry’ in 1995. It is a very moving essay and in my opinion one of the best in the collection. As she has successfully worked through her experiences in her own analysis, she