You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The book, which is dedicated to a central topic of today's psychoanalysis, is based on a 2014 conference, “Trauma, Destruction and Transformative Potential”. This took place in New York City over the weekend when the 9/11 Memorial Museum opened there. As Maureen Murphy points out in her brief introduction, this made the theme of the conference very topical.
As is well known, psychoanalysis began as a theory of trauma, but Freud's radical turn to inner fantasies and conflicts influenced the psychoanalytic community for years. Although Freud himself remained interested in the effects of early traumatizations throughout his life, a kind of taboo arose in the psychoanalytic community for decades, putting the influence of external reality behind psychic determination by unconscious phantasies and inner mental states. This changed in recent decades, when a large number of psychoanalytic or interdisciplinary conferences and workshops on trauma took place and a flood of articles and books were published. The volume edited by McBride and Murphy offers an excellent overview of the current state of knowledge in psychoanalytic trauma research and the still virulent controversies. It also provides differentiated insights into treatment opportunities and challenges as well as specific technical requirements.
The volume is clearly divided into four parts with 16 chapters and lays out its focus on “Clinical Perspectives”. Almost all contributions contain more or less detailed case studies, mainly from psychoanalyses with adults, but also from children and adolescents. The question of the relationship between trauma and inner psychic conflicts runs like a thread through the theoretical framing:
The dichotomy is between those more traditional analysts who believe that preexisting intrapsychic conflict is reflected in the individuaĺs response to trauma as well as on the development of conflict subsequent to the trauma and those relational analysts and others who emphasize the role of ex