ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the pressures to which the analyst can become subject and explores how these relate to the patient's experience of trauma and early relational trauma. It provides a comprehensible and narrative exploration of these dynamics that can explain why the analyst may come to act in ways that can result in impasses, extreme conflict, the prolonging of the patient's suffering and distress, or engage in enactments that can lead to the breakdown of the analytic relationship. Fordham describes how the patient reacts against the parts of the analyst that they see as "technical and mechanistic", and attempts to "unmask and obtain" a "good, hidden part" of the analyst for themselves. The chapter suggests that the analytic task in the case of trauma, and many others, is precisely to work through what was traumatic and felt "inhuman"—for the mother, following a series of catastrophes, to abandon her child.
