ABSTRACT
The Trauma Project originated in the early 1980s under the instigation of Joseph Sandler, and was conducted by a team of six psychoanalysts meeting twice weekly and working in cooperation with him. It was designed as a research project, whose aim was the examination of the scope of the analytic concept psychic trauma. The lack of linguistic clarity indicated a significant need generally for conceptual clarification in psychoanalysis, and the Trauma Project was designed as a pilot study offering a methodological approach for doing research. Sandler’s reflections on conceptual change attributed flexible dimensions of meaning to psychoanalytic concepts, with conceptual expansion taking place in the context of clinical experience. Implicit theories may be seen as metaphoric approximations at a subjective level for both analyst and patient of certain types of deeply unconscious internal experience of the analytic relationship, he says, observing that “science uses metaphor in the absence of detailed knowledge of the underlying process”.
