Meeting the orphan: early relational trauma, synchronicity and the psychoid

In this paper I attempt to show how deep engagement, which is gradually developed within the relational container, can facilitate access to the psychoid dimension of the unconscious characterized by a quality of interconnectedness. The resulting synchronistic experiences can support and strengthen this container as well as having profound re-connecting impact on the people involved. With this in mind, I suggest that openness to this dimension can be very important in working with the issues of loss, abandonment, aloneness and mistrust in human connections - the symbolic domain of the orphan. Although none of the patients I describe in this paper were actual orphans, symbolically the orphan theme featured significantly in their processes, in that early relational trauma left them feeling profoundly alone and unable to trust human contact. For this reason, the most important yet difficult challenge of the work was to help them restore their sense of connectedness to themselves and to others. I consider the role of attunement and reverie as the basis for facilitating this openness and propose that such openness can be seen as a feature of the analytic attitude in its own right and that it constitutes a unique contribution of the Jungian approach to working with early trauma.

Self-disclosure, trauma and the pressures on the analyst

This paper argues that self-disclosure is intimately related to traumatic experience and the pressures on the analyst not to re-traumatize the patient or repeat traumatic dynamics. The paper gives a number of examples of such pressures and outlines the difficulties the analyst may experience in adopting an analytic attitude - attempting to stay as closely as possible with what the patient brings. It suggests that self-disclosure may be used to try to disconfirm the patient's negative sense of themselves or the analyst, or to try to induce a positive sense of self or of the analyst which, whilst well-meaning, may be missing the point and may be prolonging the patient's distress. Examples are given of staying with the co-construction of the traumatic early relational dynamics and thus working through the traumatic complex; this attitude is compared and contrasted with some relational psychoanalytic attitudes.

Working in the borderland: early relational trauma and Fordham's analysis of 'K'

This paper outlines a view of early relational trauma as underlying borderline states of mind, and argues that Knox's paper on internal working models and the complex provides a basis for understanding such states of mind. The author argues that in addition to internal working models, the complex also embodies and contains primitive defences of the core self. He outlines how these apply on the objective, subjective, transference and archetypal levels, and in direct and reversed forms and applies this to the account of Fordham's analysis of his patient 'K', which ended in impasse. The paper explores the dynamic that emerged in that analysis and suggests that it could be helpfully accounted for in terms of the co-construction and re-construction of early relational trauma in the analytic relationship.