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Catastrophe and the Capacity To Withstand it: An Adolescent Responds to Personal Tragedy. Myron Stocking. Pp. 412-434.
The author first reviews writings, beginning with Freud's, about the etiology and course of the post-traumatic stress response. He then gives a detailed account of the history and the nine-month psychotherapy of a fifteen-year-old girl who, a year before beginning treatment, had seen her father shoot and kill her mother, her grandfather, and himself. The detailed description of the process of the therapy offers an unusual opportunity to examine the coping strategies of this sturdy young woman, her psychodynamics and the ways in which her therapist and the therapy helped her. Stocking then speculates about the processes of trauma and mastery. "Both are responses to the interplay within the individual between unconscious fantasy and external reality." Vulnerable individuals "find a confirmation of destructive fantasies in traumatic life experience." Conversely, others with a sense of inner goodness and integration can understand the difference between inner experience and external events and can master catastrophic events, even developing an "enhanced ability to weather hardship."