The trauma and disillusionment of Oedipus

Trauma as a monstrous quasi-object

It is characteristic of a trauma that the subject cannot process and symbolically represent the traumatic experience. With Lacan's theory of 'the real', the traumatic experience is understood as one of being overwhelmed by a monstrous quasi-object. In developmental terms, I refer to a traumatic core (birth) and the subject's traumatic susceptibility. It manifests itself during childhood in transitions from one ontological constitution to another that are necessitated by internal or external changes. Such transitions involve the child's particular reliance on his primary objects, and they require specific appropriate reactions from them. This also applies to the child's general dependence, as his primary objects must react appropriately to his constitution as a child, so that he can feel existentially affirmed by them in his being. The adult, also, is reliant on knowing that he is affirmed as a human being in his existence, which can be experienced in the affirmative gaze of the other. Metaphorically speaking, this also applies to the gaze and behaviour of the natural and technological environment, which can transform, like a personal object, into a traumatic monstrous quasi-object. The paper concludes with a clinical vignette in which the emergence and transformation of a monstrous quasi-object is illustrated in the treatment of a female patient suffering from severe early traumata.

Through the looking glass: On trauma and unreality

In 1938, when discussing disavowal, Freud said: "This behaviour strikes us forcibly as being a turning away from reality - a procedure that we should prefer to reserve for psychosis." (author's italics). The fascinating ambiguity of "we should prefer" informs the thinking in this paper, about a patient who was simultaneously attached to reality, and addicted to switching into a world of unreality which protected her from delusional beliefs originating from traumatic experiences in early childhood. The author describes the rigid, almost unbridgeable split in the patient's ego as deriving from different traumas, creating very different experiences in the transference and countertransference: what she conceptualises as a melancholic cluster, in which the experience of unbearable abandonment comes from the impossibility of repairing a ruined Object; and a schizoid cluster characterised by a delusional transference to the analyst as a schizoid Object, and a threat to existential survival connected to paranoid-schizoid terrors.