ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the deleterious effects of trauma on the capacity for thinking, a particular psychic state trauma creates in the personality and the relationship between this state and the symbolic forms available for representation of the trauma. It presents an extended clinical example illustrating movement from evacuative project identification toward greater capacity for symbolic expression of traumatic experience. A movement arises from the representational imperative activated in the patient, the analyst and in the Field itself and which eventually leads to a dramatic, emotionally meaningful symbolic form structured in the form of an aporia. It is the invitation to think that partly accounts for the origins and continual evolution of the intersubjective Field described in Bionian and post-Bionian Field Theory and is analogous to Ogden’s concept of the intersubjective third. The chapter draws on a phenomenology that recognizes both unshared and shared experience, and the complicated manner in which they commingle and create each other.
