ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on the SAO/TEND perspective and notions about ego, maturation, repression, dissociation, and the foundations of trauma, including 1) Affects; 2) a shift from a one-person to a two-person mode of listening; 3) developmental vs. incident trauma; 4) relational schemas and traumatic dissociation; 5) the difference between the child and adult in their respective trauma states; 6) a “doomsday orientation” often found in people who have experienced trauma; 7) the implications that adult traumatic experiences have for understanding TEND; 8) the importance and foundations of safety, security, and their relational and intrapsychic contexts, enabling a foundation for redefining “love”; 9) interpersonal space (Winnicott), experience potential, and potential Other; 10) Bion’s conception and preconception; and 11) going on being and the experience of too much.
Unless we address traumatic components of relational encounters, we miss important elements of the Infant’s experience, lack the means of attunement, replicate the Infant’s traumatic experience of a PO, and reinforce his traumatogenically-derived basis of reality. Recognizing these dynamics facilitates awareness of enactments (seen as imprints of character structure) and split-off subcomponents and dyads (free radicals of experience, object relations potentials) that are available for engagement in therapeutic interventions.
