ABSTRACT
This chapter presents material from psychoanalytic work with two women, who had been exposed to severe traumatizing experiences, and shows how they struggled to create psychic space and narratives that made it more possible for them and their close ones to go on living. The traumatized person will try to organize experiences in unconscious templates or scenarios that are expressed in different, more or less disguised, ways in relation to others and self. When working psychoanalytically with traumatized patients, the analyst inevitably becomes involved in these unsymbolized, fragmentary, and, as a rule, strongly affective scenarios related to the patient's traumatizing experiences. Psychoanalytic therapy has a historical perspective and works with problems related to the self and self-esteem, with enhancing the ability to resolve reactions to trauma through improved reflective functioning, and it aims at internalization of more secure inner working models of relationships.
