One of my favorite courses at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies is the third year’s course on Trauma, probably because trauma accompanies most, if not all, of our patients into our offices. Trauma is ubiquitous, and we struggle with making sense of our own, sometimes simultaneously, just as we struggle with aiding patients make sense of theirs.
When we discuss intergenerational transmission of trauma in class an interesting paper is one by Alessandra Cavalli. While clearly steeped in Object Relations theory with its concomitant metapsychology, I especially liked the metaphor of the “void” or the “deadly” for it brought to mind Donnell Stern’s “unformulated experience,” Christopher Bollas’ “unthought known” and, as Cavalli notes, Bion’s “nameless dread.” To become known requires a “matrix,” or what Robert Stolorow calls a “context,” a relational home. Cavalli notes that she uses the patient’s past not for reconstruction so much as to link, give meaning, and that words and representations need a safe space in which to come into being.
Annihilation anxiety is great in children of traumatized and dissociated caregivers. Just as Andre Green’s “dead mother,” depressed and offering only deprivation, cannot create meaning for the infant (such that the infant itself is deadened), a caregiver with unresolved trauma cannot respond, see, recognize the infant’s experience (can not hold the infant in mind, cannot mentalize nor foster mentalization) and so the infant brain does not sufficiently develop a sense of self. (Winnicott described a disruption in “going on being.”) Additionally, parental anxiety gives the child the experience that the world is dangerous and possibly can destroy the infant. The caregiver’s failure to regulate the infant’s overwhelming affects, likewise, produces anxiety in the child. [I particularly liked the author’s idea of the enduring presence of absence (in the mother) creates a “dead third.”]
The analyst is tasked with developing an increased capacity to tolerate affects and to withstand identification with the patient’s experience, that is, connecting with the void, while also helping to give form (representation and words) to experience and thereby integrate disparate self states; the adult self and the child self can be in conversation. By bearing witness, the analyst helps the patient withstand seeing more parts of herself. The analyst’s curiosity and holding in mind the patient fosters growth of the patient’s mind, that is, promotes mentalization.
One note of disagreement is the author’s statement that there can be no separation if there is not representation. This seems like old-fashioned Mahlerian language to me. As Daniel Stern pointed out, an infant has a sense of separateness very early on, so this idea might better be phrased in terms of insecure attachment, such as either a denied or debilitating longing for a mother able to be present.
Cavalli, A. (2012). Transgenerational Transmission of Indigestible Facts: From Trauma, Deadly Ghosts and Mental Voids to Meaning-Making Interpretations. J. Anal. Psychol., 57(5):597-614
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