ABSTRACT
There is an important but not widely discussed aspect of the representation of traumata in memory. It is the phenomenon of reversal, which is manifest in sudden and often puzzling switches in transferential experience and behavior. The changes in who-one-is in traumatic representation might be ®guratively conceived as occurring, at any moment, in three dimensions. First, there is a range of people, occurring in the present, who are good, bad, likeable, incompetent, and so on, who, as it were, are confronting and linking to a range of experiences of the other. Who-one-is, here, occurs along a horizontal plane. A second category of experiences is vertical, ¯uctuating along a chronological axis. The individual's states range between those of a young person and those of someone who is more nearly mature. The third dimension is also in the horizontal plane, orthogonal to the ®rst. It involves a back-and-forth change in which the subject becomes the other. This chapter concerns this last axis.
