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During a time when the winds of war were rising in the distance, I was at a conference that focused on the interface between psychoanalytic theory and culture. Enquiring minds had come together in their attempts to explore—and perhaps better understand—some of the complexities of living in today's world. The texts were intriguing and complex, often abstract and abstruse, inviting us to wander further in our forays. The subtext, however, was unmistakable, as themes of terror, trauma, persecution, atrocity, and the seeming inevitability of escalating war hovered at the edges of our collective consciousness.
The ostensible theme of the conference was the “desire of the analyst,” but the subtheme was desire itself and how easily desire becomes perverted, denied, and demonized. I had spoken, the first morning, of how trauma disconnects us from our primary sensory experience, from knowing the “language of the body” sufficiently well to heed its cues and work within its parameters. Trauma encourages defensive occlusion of primary perception from our awareness, thereby also precluding effective, adaptive integration of and response to its signals. Later that evening I was to have an experience that brought to life quite vividly these principles, as I was confronted by an individual who had seemingly brought her trauma with her, and then reencountered and reenacted it within the confines of the conference.
Klein (1946, 1952) describes quite vividly the demonization of the other: how repudiated aspects of self become persecutors, haunting and hounding us. Whatever we refuse to recognize within the self becomes projected outward, experienced as a persecuting other, taunting, mocking, and threatening us, ostensibly