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.
In the Prologue that I wrote for the first issue of “How Do We Explain Psychoanalytic Improvement in Patients Who Have Been Highly Traumatized: An Exploration of Therapeutic Action in Psychoanalysis,” I described that the place of reality in the analytic relationship is especially important when dealing with patients whose ability to deal with reality is seriously compromised. In the analytic relationship, one should be able to follow the nature of dynamic transformations where pathological and nonpathological perceptions of reality that become central to the material are expressed and played out with the analyst.
In the Epilogue of that issue, I wrote that each author of the articles in the issue emphasized that the approach to the patient that led to success in the treatment was based on Ron Bodansky’s ability to reach the humanity and wholeness of Mrs. E, so that she could experience the safety of being human, which included the recognition of her enormously traumatic experience that contributed to her identity. Ron Bodansky was able to do this because he was able to avoid remaining in the abyss of the patient’s defensive regressive withdrawal from the reality of the present moment that had made her life so difficult; instead he provided her with a new experience of his entering the abyss with her and recovering from it as he empathized and reached out to her in the intensity of the reality of the analytic interchange.
In this second issue, Paolo Stramba-Badiale describes an analysis that he conducted with a highly traumatized woman, Veronica. The articles and discussion in this issue enable the reader to deepen further the understanding of how to explain analytic improvement in patients who have been highly traumatized. Reading the articles in this issue takes one beyond the safety and empathy that was discussed in the first issue. The theme that appears repeatedly in this issue is that the analyst must join the patient in bearing her suffering and then help the p