ABSTRACT
This chapter conceptualises dynamics related to the interaction between the traumatised and non-traumatised part of the personality and its association to Klein's positions, as well as to distorions of time and space. The emotions attached to both, the “good-idealised” and the “bad-persecutory” part objects, are opposite and correlate. Pre-conceptual traumas are accumulated unconsciously as unprocessed memories, undigested sensory experiences, or “part objects” waiting for thinking a mind to “contain” them. These memory traces, representing Bion’s notion of “beta elements”, are the stuff that structure the traumatised state of the personality and the paranoidschizoid position. The “depressive position” or non-traumatised state of the personality, on the other hand, represents the capacity for containing or understanding and metabolising these repudiated memories. What fails is the absence of an alpha function capable of producing dream thoughts, changing bivalent beta elements into total objects. There is another very important unconscious interaction, associated to mechanisms of reality testing also facilitating the production of repetition compulsion.
