ABSTRACT

Trauma and Primitive Mental States: An Object Relations Perspective offers a clinically based framework through which adult survivors of early childhood trauma can re-engage with painful past events to create meaningful futures for themselves.

The book highlights the use of the body and the mind in working with these early unmentalized and unrepresented states, illustrating the value of finding language that embodies emotions, and working in the here and now of transference and counter-transference. Including a range of examples of how early trauma can thus be re-presented and clinically understood, the book illustrates how patients can discover themselves and leave their repetitive patterns of suffering behind.

Written by a clinician with over 30 years’ experience, this will be fascinating reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as any mental health professional working with childhood trauma.

chapter Chapter 1|14 pages

Between body and mind

Transforming physical experience into psychic development in the clinical situation

chapter Chapter 2|14 pages

Affective bridges between body and mind

chapter Chapter 3|13 pages

The silent transference

Clinical reflections on Ferenczi, Klein, and Bion

chapter Chapter 4|8 pages

Somatic counter-transference

chapter Chapter 6|15 pages

Infantile trauma, therapeutic impasse, and recovery

chapter Chapter 7|16 pages

Finding the impulse

Healing from infantile trauma

chapter Chapter 8|18 pages

The body as a mode of representation