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The Toronto Group's interest in sorting out the psychological and societal confusions regarding traumatic processes in the course of development continues. Dr. Jim Deutsch presented “From Rat Man to Rat Pup: Implications of Epigenetic Studies of Stress and Trauma.” The talk was stimulated by a study on rat pups apparently lacking pain and aversive responses to experimentally induced “abusive caregiving” (Raineki, Moriceau, & Sullivan, 2010), as well as by caveats in current literature against overly enthusiastic reductionism (Albert, 2010; Meaney, 2010) and concern about ethical pitfalls in the seemingly widespread application of a simple model of traumatic processes to contexts such as prison, war, and torture.
We reviewed psychoanalytic studies of manifestations (Fraiberg, 1982) and underlying mechanisms of trauma (Counts, 1974; Fraiberg, Adelson, & Shapiro, 1975; Sandler & Rosenblatt, 1962), and theoretical confusions resulting from the loose use of terms such as mourning and feeling, as well as neglect of the importance of the developmental stage at which traumatic events occur (A. Freud, 1960; Solms, 1997).
The rat study paradigm appears to involve significant, multiple stressors to the mother rat and pups, and the limitations of the conclusions contrasted with our much more complex understanding of human family and societal traumas, as exemplified by Freud's (1909) Rat Man case study and