ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the kind of emotions and phantasies children have when they face the serious illness and sometimes death of a sibling. Freud described the essence of trauma as an experience of helplessness of the ego, where the level of emotional arousal cannot be processed by the ordinary defence mechanisms usually deployed by the ego in managing anxiety. Trauma thus presupposes the body/mind being flooded or overwhelmed by the emotional and sensory aspects of the experience. Emotions need to be regulated by the mental apparatus responsible for processing them, but if this is overwhelmed or undeveloped, then trauma ensues and a state of emotional dysregulation is the result. Psychotherapy with children attempts to help them feel that their most unbearable anxieties, stemming from the traumatic dys-regulated states, can be received in the first instance, tolerated, and then be named.
