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Ira Brenner's Dark Matters is a deeply moving, informative and thought provoking book about the impact of psychic trauma on the human mind. Having devoted decades to the psychoanalytic study and treatment of traumatized patients, Dr Brenner shares with his readers the knowledge and understanding he acquired over the years on the complex layers of response to psychic devastation, which he poetically calls, the dark matters of the mind.
Brenner's early work with adult and child survivors of the Holocaust and on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, set the stage for his growing interest in the study of dissociation, a normative mental capacity, which could be used defensively in varying degrees to cope with traumatic circumstances. After starting to work at a unit that treated patients with dissociative pathology, he got the opportunity to observe and work with severely traumatized individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), whose emotional survival depended on the development and maintenance of dissociated self-states, or “sequestered pockets of psychological experience” (Akhtar, 2009, p. 3). Dr Brenner tells us that he has found much to learn from the psychoanalytic study of these patients, about how trauma, suffered in the hands of caregivers at a very young age, is dealt with psychically.
This book builds upon the compilation of work and research Dr Brenner has done over the past 25 years on the effects of trauma in general, and on DID, in particular. With his vast clinical experience and careful study of the psychoanalytic literature, Brenner presents a comprehensive theory of dissociation and the dissociative processes in trauma. In addition, he ventures into extrapolating his understanding of the DID dynamics to large group conflicts of “traumatized societies,” which is another area of interest to him. By using detailed clinical examples from his work with patients with DID he discusses technique and treatment recommendations for clinicians, an