ABSTRACT
Validation of trauma is critical in the healing of the self after trauma. Validation is also important in affirming the dimensions of the trauma, as it repeats itself in compulsions and projective identifications in present life. The psychoanalyst needs to help the patient discover and validate her own trauma, and also needs to be an active source of validation at times. When the parent is incapable of tolerating regret, and therefore, of communicating validation of early traumatic events in the family, the analyst naturally becomes a primary source for the patient’s validation. The analyst needs to help the patient see the parents’ incapacity to offer validation by helping her understand the psychic capacities needed to face the regret. The validation is of the parent’s psychic arrest and of the parent’s pathological intolerance of the conscious experience of guilt, intolerance of the psychic transformation of guilt into an affect-level experience of grief within regret.
