You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Peter Shabad has singled out for investigation a phenomenon of compelling interest and, I think, does so very usefully. There is a way in which a seriously and cumulatively traumatized person attempts to avoid the pain of recognition of the past. In ways that are extremely difficult to pinpoint, this ongoing failure of recognition is intimately connected with the individual's present-day effectiveness and adaptation are compromised. Shabad focuses on the capacity for genuine emotional reciprocity and the capacity to give and receive as especially vulnerable to the residues of trauma.
My own interests in recent years have been similar, namely, the ways in which trauma is intimately connected with the repetition compulsion. The traumatized person attempts to avoid the pain of recognition of the past and in so doing re-creates (presumably unwittingly) the experience of injury and arranges relationships in such a way that the sort of interpersonal experience that is most potentially helpful becomes in this regard what is least likely to occur. How and why this should be the case is, by all appearances, “uncanny” (Freud, 1919) and “daemonic” (Freud, 1920). It is also obviously of profound interest to anyone with the temerity to offer help. One could make a case for defining our enterprise as the attempt to help in those contexts where a person's relationship with his past makes that help less probable than it would have been otherwise.