Realities Lost and Found: Trauma, Dissociation, and Somatic Memories in a Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Somatic memories were defined as virtual mental states unarticulated and unintegrated with the cognitive and affective components of the traumatic experiences. The preponderance of somatic manifestations in the early emergence of memories of childhood sexual abuse was accounted for as follows: 1) the trauma was somatic in nature to begin with and was encoded, stored, and retrieved in memory along somaticsensory channels; 2) the physical dimension of the trauma was an intensive foreground experience; 3) the original experience was never articulated beyond the level of the physical aspect; and 4) the somatic nature of the memories concretized and validated the reality of the traumatic experience.

A case was presented of a woman who recovered memories of early, severe, and chronic childhood sexual abuse during the course of analysis. This clinical material illustrated the prevalence of somatic manifestations in the early stages of memory retrieval. The material also demonstrated the establishment and evolution of a deepening validating intersubjective tie with the analyst that was crucial to the emergence of the traumatic recollections. The case material traced the diminution of the dissociative process and the growing cognitive and affective awareness achieved by the patient as she integrated her newly discovered reality into her ongoing self-organization.