The Psychic Space in Trauma

“Her sullen resistance, which I had taken to be hostility, I now understood to be a dulling and deadening of her mind. The pall that fell over the sessions was a deadening in us both. I tried to show her she felt a need not to be aware, to make us both unthinking - she should not know me and I should not know her”.

I want to use this paper to think about an autistic, deadened, psychic space resulting from trauma. I begin with a statement and then attempt to give this statement meaning through theoretical constructs and case material.

Trauma is a psychic wound, caused by a violent intrusion. An excess of psychic pain floods the ego. Projective identification fails as a container. The psychic pain becomes unbearable and there is fear of fragmentation and death. Internal objects are destroyed, omnipotence takes their place, so there is no mourning. There is unthinkable fear, so there is no thinking, and hence no symbolization. The experience of negative feelings is greater than that of positive ones, causing archaic denial and regression to primary processing, instead of repression and secondary processing. What is left is a non-living space, where knowing would be it if could be known, where thought would be if it could be thought. This space has an autistic, deadening quality. Its cause is demonstrably similar to that described by Tustin (1972, 1981, 1988) in autistic children.

I will try to show how understanding this space has profound implications for therapy. I suggest there are specific, definable, therapeutic techniques by which this dead inner space may be restored to a psychic living experience. In therapy this deadened area becomes a space where agony previously avoided is tolerated, despair held, psychic pain of loss suffered and fear contained. Awareness of dosage and timing is all too relevant. Interpreting that focuses on love and hate or good and evil in the patient can be persecutory. The focus of the analytic therapy