ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the difficulties encountered by the child when her primary attachment figure is unable to join with her intersubjectively. Quite often in clinical practice, these difficulties occur in the context of a parent who is unable to tolerate the affects, thoughts, memory traces, and fantasies of the traumatized child. The emotionally regulated and regulating therapist as a reflective third in the fractured dyadic system can serve as a catalytic model of and support for joint attention to inner states in child, parent, and the therapist’s self. The chapter then reviews empirical neuroscientific research in support of the need to address the failure of intersubjective development in families in which one or more parents suffer(s) from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) linked to interpersonal violence. Finally the paper illustrates the concepts presented via a brief clinical vignette of a psychoanalytically informed parent–child psychotherapy involving a preschool-age girl and her mother who both experienced violence at the hands of her father.
