ABSTRACT
In trying to elucidate the range of responses to trauma, from diagnosable psychiatric syndromes like posttraumatic stress disorder to subclinical reactions, the clinician must ask himself: What is lost? What is not working? These questions in turn raise the theoretically important issue of why and how some people respond better to traumatic situations than do others. Since the pioneering work of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham studying children during the London Blitz in World War II, an impressive body of knowledge has arisen that suggests not only that the child's attachment relationships function as the decisive buffer to trauma in childhood but also that a secure attachment history in childhood provides the best prophylaxis against the future vicissitudes of adult traumatization.
The culmination of this tradition has come in the work of Peter Fonagy, Mary Target, and their colleagues at the Anna Freud Centre in London over the past decade. They have produced an impressive body of work, based on clinical and nonclinical populations, that shows how the attachment relationship facilitates or compromises the child's growing ability to be flexibly aware of his or her own mind and the mind of others. Articulation of the roots of this ability in an expanded attachment framework, in turn, has allowed them to redefine the psychological nature of the resilience to trauma. In this current contribution, Fonagy and Target seek to answer the decisive questions as to what is lost in traumatization and what is required for it to be regained.
