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Ira Brenner has been working in the field of psychic trauma for more than two decades. He has written extensively about the far-reaching and long-lasting effects of severe, recurrent, and massive trauma. Trained as a psychoanalyst, he is uniquely qualified to articulate what psychoanalysis can contribute to our understanding and treatment of trauma.
It was in Brenner's earlier work with Holocaust survivors and their children that he came to appreciate the phenomenon of transposition, a term coined by Kestenberg to describe how defenses of deeply traumatized people may make them appear much more disturbed than they actually are. Indeed, at times, their symptomatology resembles psychotic processes more akin to schizophrenia than adaptive ego functions.
In the present climate, the tendency is to treat the effects of severe and massive psychic trauma by focusing mainly on the external, minimizing or ignoring altogether the significance of the internal conflicts in the processes of psychic traumatization. Brenner cuts against this trend. He has never lost sight of the nature and importance of internal conflicts and of the interactions between them and external events.