“Motherliness” and Therapeutic Work A Contradiction?

LOOKING BACK AT THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AS IT developed until today, we may say that it has always been concerned in different ways with psychological trauma and its developmental consequences. Throughout the ongoing process of reformulating psychoanalytic theories, several aspects have been frequently revisited and revised. Central questions in this regard are: What constitutes trauma? Where and how does it leave its traces in the developing psyche? How do we need to address it in the therapeutic process? These questions refer, on one hand, to the experience of the patient, both within the traumatizing environment as well as within the treatment environment. On the other hand, these questions address the experiences of the therapist vis-à-vis these phenomena.

Regarding what has been conceptualized as the transference-relationship between patient and analyst, self-psychology offers a particular entrée into the dynamics unfolding between the patient and the analyst as it pays special attention to the links between the developmental shortcomings and the developmental needs the patient brings to the treatment. The analyst's role as a source of self-object functions or regulatory functions may be of greatest concern.

Both the traumatic experiences our patients present to us in their transference-enactments as well as the development-oriented expectations they may at times express openly or covertly can be quite intense and may give the treatment process a special flavor. In the following, I shall present to you the treatment of a teenage girl, Karin. Her treatment raised the above mentioned questions in a very poignant way and may serve as the basis for

the discussion of what constitutes a contemporary approach to the analytic treatment of trauma in childhood and adolescence.

I shall first introduce you to the environment in which Karin grew up before she first saw me. Then I will make the effort to track back the different stages the treatment went th