ABSTRACT
The development of personal being is impeded in two main ways, passive and active. Passive impediments come from the failure of caregivers to provide the necessary ``facilitating environment'' of resonance and recognition. Active disruption is a consequence of traumatic impacts upon the experience of personal being. They are stored in memory, frequently of an unconscious kind. Such memories repeatedly irrupt into the larger consciousness of ordinary living, sometimes merely disturbing its surface and, at others, taking it over entirely. The effect, as Pierre Janet pointed out, is to hinder maturation. He wrote:
Unable to integrate traumatic memories, they seem to have lost their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is . . . as if their personality has de®nitively stopped at a certain point, and cannot enlarge any more by the addition and assimilation of new elements.1
