ABSTRACT
The mind is relationally organized, self structure is relationally derived, and dissociations underlie that structure. SAO/TEND affirms the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and actions and the contextual and interpersonal basis of the meaning-making, learning, and characterological development that ensues from that multivariate interaction.
Character structure is built upon traumatically incurred lessons of Self–Other relationships and their trauma-specific transferences. This book brings together lessons from the trauma and psychoanalytic communities to understand how the infant’s experiences may be intrapsychically traumatic and may have led to a patient’s subsequently enacting those persecutory experiences upon himself and others.
SAO/TEND is integrative, connecting past and present and cause and effect, with attention to intrapsychic structures and the impact of subjectively traumatic incursions throughout a person’s lifespan, including in therapy. The traumatic linchpin is the traumatically engineered deconstruction of intrapsychic organization according to contingencies of safety and security required by the depended-upon other. The therapeutic approach is present-centered and empathic.
SAO/TEND addresses the question, “What makes a trauma traumatic?” It enables conceptualizations of experience and meaning that allow us to recognize traumatization and its effects in normal development, thereby thwarting collusively participating in re-traumatizing the patient’s self, however unintentionally.
