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As a psychoanalytic practitioner one seems to be bombarded in recent times with a plethora of approaches, frameworks and self-proclaimed ‘experts’ touting their wares in the field of trauma. Perhaps an inevitability, part of the Zeitgeist of our troubled times. There is nothing new about traumatic experience; and yet what Stubley and Young manage to do in this book is map out an exceptional approach in treating trauma, one that is firmly held within the psychoanalytic tradition, and yet at the same time feels new, multifaceted, and encompassing a wide range and depth of modalities and thinking.
The Tavistock Model has evolved since its inception, and this book details the move from patients presenting with a single traumatic experience, to the titular Complex Trauma, which is much more cognisant of prolonged, developmental trauma such as that experienced throughout childhood where abuse or neglect has been present, or in the cases of asylum seekers or refugees who have endured multiple losses and prolonged experiences of trauma throughout their lives.
On reading this, the first four chapters reassure you that you have embarked on a journey of discovery and that you are being led by real experts. The reader is immersed in the thinking and development of the current service. Admittedly, it is not a typical NHS service, emerging from the origins within the adult and adolescent services of what was such a specialist and innovative institution as The Tavistock Clinic. However, there is much to glean for individual practitioners and service managers alike, in the thought inherent in, and design of services for traumatised patients. It had much for me to ponder in relation to my current client group which consists of young adults struggling with the trauma of managing a chronic physical illness diagnosed in childhood. Although this is not directly addressed, the book is helpfully malleable and adaptable and orientates one to particular ways of thinking about being with the p