Revealing and Hiding, Life and Death, Finitude and Infinity: Transformation of Selfhood in Coping With the Trauma of Loss

In the psychoanalytic treatment of children who have been traumatized by losing a parental figure, it is a standard practice to think about and treat the child self in terms of a psychology that deals with mental representations. Concepts of Heinz Kohut's “self psychology” and their development in Israel in recent years by Raanan Kulka make it possible to think about and treat the trauma of loss not only through processes of mental internalization and representation, but also through processes of “transformation” of the child self into “selfhood”: an “a-structural” state of the narcissism that is present in a higher state of unitary awareness with something outside of the individual, which Kohut (1966) conceptualized as “supra-individual participation in the world.” An example of a therapeutic hour with a 4½-year-old child is presented here, illustrating the movement of the “self” between its structured state (as a self) and its non-structural transformed state (as a selfhood), and the type of therapeutic presence that enables the narcissistic movement between the self's “working through of mourning” and the transformation of loss into selfhood.