ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author suggests that traumatized people psychoanalytic treatment provides an empirical basis for outcome-relevant treatment formulations with chronic post trauma symptoms and dissociations. In addition to formulations based upon reprocessing of dissociative behaviour in the process, psychoanalytic techniques help therapists to pay attention to the potentially overwhelming phenomenological and physiological differences between the traumatic defects in different people due to their past experiences. The author identifies that a traumatized patient’s lack of response to the treatment is evidence of unhealthy dissociation and temporary emotional impairment that can be healed through therapeutic interaction and interplay in the transference–countertransference. She examines the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment while recognizing a level of commitment to newly developed methods and data derived directly from the clinical material within the psychoanalytically orientated psychotherapy treatment of traumatized patients. The author concludes with the drive model and the relational model are complete and comprehensive theories to account for human experience.
