ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the same dynamics and a comparable phenomenology hold true not only for the infantile symbolic maternal loss, but also for the traumatic loss of the good internal object at any age. In retrospect, what is striking here is the absence of such curiosity, the lack of creative speculation, and the question of whether the analyst's own childhood camp experience had defensively blinded him to the possibility that the patient might have encountered trauma in her own childhood. A narrative of the trauma is as yet nonexistent; its emergence via joint reviewing and witnessing is part of the therapeutic task. Recuperative psychological processes of symbolization and sublimation are compromised, when bereft of a reliable interhuman environment, on which they depend. The task of the therapist working with a traumatized individual is to re-establish relations which would result in the reinstatement of symbolization and wishing.
