ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how inherent in healthy development are emotional experiences that are the stuff of trauma. Failure to reintegrate these experiences means that they can serve as a resonating board for difficulties in later life, adding to their traumatic impact. An infant observation focusing on global changes that occur at the end of the first year will be presented followed by a discussion of how a six-year-old boy’s failure to integrate his emotional experiences contributed to his experiencing a normal life event as a trauma. Subsequently clinical vignettes from the analysis of a man demonstrate how later life events resonate with early experience associated with this period. All examples are linked to a complex pattern of object relations in which feelings of grief associated with an idealised object are split off from feelings of grievance against an object experienced as persecutory because of its perceived superior status.
