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Dear Editor:
Jan Abram’s “On Winnicott’s Concept of Trauma” and the elegant overview offered by Heinz Weiss (IJP Volume 102, Number 4, pp. 778-793, 755-764) offer clarifying details on Winnicott’s clinical (including pediatric and war-time service) observations on his concept of “trauma”, a term that can be overused and diffuse. Abram demonstrates that Winnicott’s concept focusing on infantile/early childhood trauma connects early “parent-infant psychic transmissions”, “because of the mother’s affective states … ” and that earlier trauma can result in “more severe outcomes”. Yet Winnicott also subtly argues that there must be some psychic structure available in the infant in order to “experience” what to the outside observer may be maternal (or paternal) traumatogenic acts. This letter complements and adds conceptual, empirical and developmental foundations to Abram’s Winnicott observations on trauma in early childhood. The first contribution is from John Bowlby, Winnicott’s contemporary at the Tavistock. The second, some three decades later, is from Dan Stern. Both researcher/clinicians, while working from somewhat different theoretical frames, strengthen and further detail developmentally Winnicott’s ideas on trauma.
Bowlby (1969) introduced “attachment” as that construction between infant and parent that, during times of fear, results in safety and comforting and, in the infant, in the balance of security and exploration. This adds a conceptual and developmental framework that complements and enriches psychoanalytic theory and Winnicott’s ideas in general. Specifically, Bowlby’s work defines “trauma” in early childhood at least as any serious loss or threatened loss of a major caregiving figure. This can be the death of a parent, or severe psychosis (such as Green’s dead mother), severe drug addiction and possibly also divorce, as shown empirically in our 30-year developmental study (Massie and Szajnberg [2008] 2021). Ainsworth et al. (1978) were able to demonstrat