Where is My Mother? Childhood Trauma and the Configuration of the Self

In this account of a long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a confluence of childhood traumatogenic factors in interaction with the patient’s unconscious fantasy life resulted in dramatic permutations and distortions in the patient’s self- organization. From a different but related perspective, the psychic repercussions of an incompletely mourned and internalized maternal object are also explored. The prevailing psychic script or narrative, deeply embedded and nearly intractable, revolved around the patient’s conscious and unconscious conviction of mortal sin and guilt in response to her mother’s death - imposing on her the penalty of “a life for a life.” During the course of treatment, the patient’s investment in becoming a good mother became a powerful incentive for the recovery of previously inaccessible experience, facilitating a gradual movement toward psychic integration. While the primary transference at the outset of treatment was the therapist’s nonexistence, replicating the patient’s experience of abandonment-obliteration, the development of the therapeutic relationship was essential to the gradual assimilation of dissociated traumatic experience and the enlivenment of the unrepresented maternal object.