ABSTRACT
This chapter describes two features of therapeutic work with survivors which, although relevant in clinical work as a whole, are particular issues for those who present after a traumatic event. First, there is the way in which a trauma can link up powerfully with events of the past, through long-established existing internal object relationships. Second, it shows how the failure of containment by the maternal object, represented by the fact of the traumatic event's having happened at all, leads inevitably to difficulties in the area of symbolisation. The chapter also describes an individual, a seventeen year old girl, and the impact on her of a highly traumatic rape. It suggests that the flashback is the experience of the loss of the container: the internalised place, or vessel, or space, intimately connected with good early care, in which thinking-about-something can occur.
