Main description:

Trauma and Primitive Mental States: An Object Relations Perspective offers a clinically based framework through which adult survivors of early childhood trauma can re-engage with painful past events to create meaningful futures for themselves.

The book highlights the use of the body and the mind in working with these early unmentalized and unrepresented states, illustrating the value of finding language that embodies emotions, and working in the here and now of transference and counter-transference. Including a range of examples of how early trauma can thus be re-presented and clinically understood, the book illustrates how patients can discover themselves and leave their repetitive patterns of suffering behind.

Written by a clinician with over 30 years' experience, this will be fascinating reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as any mental health professional working with childhood trauma.

Contents:

Foreword Howard D. Levine, MD

Introduction

Chapter 1: Between Body and Mind: Transforming Physical Experience
into Psychic Development in the Clinical Situation

Chapter 2: Affective Bridges Between Body and Mind

Chapter 3: The Silent Transference: Clinical Reflections on
Ferenczi, Klein, and Bion

Chapter 4: Somatic Countertransference

Chapter 5: Finding a Center of Gravity via Proximity to the Analyst

Chapter 6: Infantile Trauma, Therapeutic Impasse, and Recovery

Chapter 7: Finding the Impulse: Healing from Infantile Trauma

Chapter 8: The Body as a Mode of Representation

Bibliography

Index