Customer Reviews

The Shattered Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of Trauma

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The role of trauma in psychopathology, including the meaning of traumatic experiences in relation to fantasies, has engaged psychoanalysts from Freud on. In The Shattered Self, Richard Ulman and Doris Brothers employ the principles of psychoanalytic self psychology to arrive at a new understanding of trauma. Utilizing a unique clinical research population of rape and incest victims and Vietnam combat veterans, they argue that trauma results from real occurences that have, as their unconscious meaning, the shattering of "central organizing fantasies" of self in relation to selfobject. It is the shattering and faulty restoration of such archaic narcissistic fantasies, Ulman and Brothers argue, that gain expression in the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PSTD). Taking issue with the current DSM III classification of PSTD as an anxiety disorder, the author argues, on the basis of their empirical findings, that the numbing and reexperiencing characteristic of the syndrome are in fact symptoms of dissociation.

Prefacing their reconceptualization of trauma with a thorough review of the literature from Freud, Ferenczi, and Federn through recent contributions to PTSD, Ulman and Brothers proceed to outline an innovative treatment approach to trauma victims based on their self-psychological theory. Then, in three in depth case studies, they demonstrate how psychoanalytic therapy informed by this theory can overcome the effects of trauma through the transformation of shattered fantasies in the intersubjective context of the transference-countertransference neurosis.

Being at once a record of a unique research project integrating clinical data from different types of trauma victims, an important contribution to our understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder, and a thoughtful elaboration of Heinz Kohut's seminal insights about self experience, The Shattered Self is an example of clinically consequential theorizing about a socially important population. It will be read and utilized by psychoanalysis, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers alike. And it will be valued not only for advancing a powerful new theory of trauma, but for clarifying the conceptual and therapeutic issues at stake in any theory of trauma.
--- from book's dustjacket