Intergenerational Transmission of Violence: Shattered Subjectivity and Relational Freedom (original) (raw)
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This article addresses the tension in psychoanalytic thinking regarding adult-onset trauma and its potential effects on children who were not directly exposed to the same parental trauma. Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes early attachment trauma as predictive of the response to trauma later in life. This emphasis on early trauma delayed recognition of adult-onset trauma-related disorders and the development of adequate trauma-focused treatments. Presently, the confluence of findings from multiple disciplines, including trauma studies, biological research, and epidemiological data from across the globe, demonstrates the potentially devastating impact of adult-onset post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following exposure to trauma, such as war, terror, and assaultive violence. Empirical evidence highlights the critical role of post-trauma family and social support in recovery from PTSD or, alternatively, in delayed PTSD. Given the numbers of servicemen returning from combat zones with post-traumatic disorders and other populations around the globe exposed to extreme political violence, new effective trauma-focused treatments are needed. Integration of perspectives within psychoanalytic theories and "cross pollination" among the fields of psychoanalysis, attachment studies, cognitive-behavioral psychology, neuroscience, and trauma research will enhance innovative and effective interventions that harvest beneficial therapeutic elements from multiple approaches.
The Consequences of Violence Within The Family. The Care of The Suffering Infant
To enable us to orientate ourselves in the topic that has been proposed to me today and, in other words, the pathogenic consequences of family violence which the child witnesses, we must familiarise ourselves with two fundamental concepts: the psychic trauma and the functioning of the infantile mind. As always, it will be useful to refer to the etymology of the word. The word " trauma " comes from the Greek " τραμα " (perforation) meaning " passing beyond ". This word strongly indicates the action of crossing a barrier, a border and of disintegrating a structure. The psychic trauma is fundamentally subjective (in other words the same event has dramatically diverse consequences depending on the maturation of the psychic apparatus of the subject who undergoes it and on the constitution of his psychobiological ground) and it is classically described as an event that floods the mind with an hyper-afflux of stimulus that cannot be managed and which disintegrates in a permanent manner the following capability of response to the stimuli, deforming it. To get a common idea we can all think of those situations of enormous fright we have experienced that leave us paralysed: the behavioural paralysis is due to the generally transitory incapability of our mind being able to manage the overflowing intensity of the perceptive stimulus. As Manuela Tartari underlines in a very important trilogy dedicated to Trauma, beyond the differences of interpretation all psychoanalysts observe how the traumatised patients are unable to remember or call to mind the associative nuclei (representations and affects) connected to the trauma. We speak about non representable or better still non thinkable experiences. Freud reminds us with his absolute and shocking clarity: " Every impression whose resolution through associative mental work or motor reaction, presents difficulty to the nervous system becomes a psychic trauma " (On The Psychical Mechanism Of Hysterical Phenomena, 1893) To get an idea about how much the adult/child interaction can drastically influence the psychic development of the human being I would like to refer to some notes that I presented in a recent work of mine. " …Does a parent have any power? Apart from the enormous imbalance of the physical strengths involved, here we are speaking about the human psychism and we can say without any difficulty: Yes he does! A parent can make a human being go crazy. It is sufficient to look at the studies of Gregory Bateson on the 'double bind', believed to be one of the various causes of the schizophrenia. As we all know the so-called 'double bind' is a situation in which the communication between two individuals who are connected by a close and important emotional relationship, presents an unresolvable conflict between the level of explicit verbal speech and the non-verbal meta-communicative level (the tone of voice, the facial expression, the modulation of the gaze, the gesture, the behaviour), and the situation is such that the receiver of the message does not have the minimal possibility of deciding which of the two messages is true (for the fact that they are in evident contradiction) and not even of underlining its incongruence.
The “Negative Object” in Two Cases of Sibling Trauma
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2018
This article develops a method to address the impact of the negative (Green, 1997, 2002) in transference work with schizoid trauma survivors. Two such patients are presented, each of whom was in a kill-or-be-killed relationship with an elder brother. The author suggests that violent sibling dyads are powerful stimulators of schizoid shutdown, specifically because they are based on this black-or-white dilemma: kill-or-be-killed. It was crucial that the parents of both patients turned a blind eye to the abuse, allowing the violent elder sibling free reign over the younger. Both patients, therefore, had a double trauma to deal with: parental absence and sibling hatred. This formed a problematic object choice: absent parent or abusive sibling? The abusive elder siblings, though terrifying, were in effect all that these patients had. Introducing a new concept, the author suggests that the abusive elder siblings became negative objects-formless forces of affect, vaguely reflecting a dangerous historical object, yet erasing that object's human features. This process of depersonification is described as a method of schizoid shutdown. In both cases the negative object caused confusion and a sense of paralysis in the transference. The author describes a method for perceiving, and then repersonifying, the negative object. This brings both the predatory sibling and the absent parent back into the transference as human objects.
Adult attachment style, reported childhood violence history and types of dissociative experiences
Undergraduate and first-year graduate students (n = 410) were assessed for adult attachment, history of exposure to violence in childhood, and frequency of four types of dissociative experiences. Violence history was related to attachment style, as were four factors extracted from two dissociation measures. Each attachment style was predicted by distinct patterns ofviolencehistory and dissociation. Importantly, the four types of dissociation, despite their conceptual relationship, were empirically independent clinical phenomena, at times entering the regression equations in significant and opposite directions. The findings are discussed in the context of empirical and clinical issues in adult attachment, child maltreatment, and dissociation.
2016
On the basis of metapsychological issues on the representation of trauma, this paper investigates how psychoanalysis supports the re-integration of the traumatic event in minors who, as victims of serious forms of violence, see memory as a threat to their defense strategies and are at risk of psychological collapse. What emerges from the experience of the authors is how the most relevant element in psychotherapy for child and adolescent abuse victims is their potential and ability for representation, as well as the intricate connections between external traumatic factors and internal dispositional factors. From a treatment perspective – referring to some of the arguments involved in the debate on changes to the basic model technique according to the internal organization of the patient – the authors suggest a technique that, by respecting the internal time frame of the patient, the fluctuations of transference and psychological functions, alternates between a supporting and an explo...
Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2023
Dissociation in child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors remains under-recognized and diagnosed, partly because of the difficulties involved in identifying dissociative symptoms. Qualitative research can contribute to a better understanding of the lived experiences of dissociation. This study focused on the experiences of dissociation in the context of CSA. In all, 22 female incest survivors, all diagnosed with different dissociative disorders, provided narratives about their experiences of dissociation. The narratives were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The narrative analysis revealed four central themes. The first theme deals with reliving the experience of the abuse. The second theme refers to the experience of disconnection from the body, the self, and the surroundings. The third theme covers the lack of coherence in the narrative, and the fourth theme describes the bridge between voluntary controlled and nonvoluntary uncontrolled use of dissociation. The data are discussed in light of several traumagenic constructs, including a lack of self-sense, being entrapped in a victim–aggressor relationship, and distorted time perception. It is suggested that the extent to which participants can control their dissociation and the coherency of their narratives reflects the severity of their dissociation. Clinicians can consider helping clients use dissociation as an adaptive defense mechanism.