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This has been a difficult book to review. My first reading of it was interrupted by the events of September 11, 2001, and in the midst of that horror, I put the book down and then found myself strangely resistant to taking it up again, even though I recalled that I had been impressed with it at first. When I took it up again, finally, I came to realize more about my resistance to dealing with this book.
Grand's work comes out of a focus on trauma and the effects of trauma on the human psyche. Theoretically, she understands trauma in an interpersonal context—an interaction between survivor and perpetrator, and she describes this interaction in the terminology of interpersonal psychoanalysis and in the Kleinian terminology of Grotstein, Mitrani, Bion, and Ogden (and others). Trauma, for Grand, involves a core that is essentially unknowable, the annihilation of the victim's very core self as a human being and the perpetrator's need to be able to deny that core of humanity in the victim. We do not speak about trauma, Grand says, because we are incapable of speaking about that core of being and its unthinkable annihilation. This book, then, is not about “mere” trauma; Grand is writing about the reality of evil.
Enduring massive trauma reacquaints the psyche with the nearness of extinction. Once again, the human mind is preoccupied with the terror of non-being. Once again, the mind asks: will the world feed me or starve me, hold me or attack me? But because the no-self of trauma has already met death, these questions have acquired a new increment of dread. They are no longer balanced by the countervailing hope, love, and play of normal infancy, but become something darker. They are asked with despair, with an assurance that goodness has absented itself with a conviction that the world “out there” is one of danger…. I would say that the perpetrator's no-self further consolidates its retreat from I- thou relatedness by embracing the insularity of pathological narcissism. And