Into the Darkest Places: Early Relational Trauma and Borderline States of Mind by Marcus West

Author:Marcus West [West, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2016-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

the analytic relationship become[s] a place that supports risk and safety simultaneously—a relationship that allows the painful reliving of early trauma, without the reliving being just a blind repetition of the past. It is optimally a relationship that I have described as “safe but not too safe” (Bromberg, 2006, pp. 153–202), by which I mean that the analyst is communicating both his ongoing concern for his patient's affective safety and his commitment to the value of the inevitably painful process of reliving. (Bromberg, 2011, pp. 16–17, original italics)

However when the traumas relate to experiences that are felt to be inhuman this can sit very discordantly in a relationship that is fundamentally construed as being human and reparative. If the analyst is prepared to accompany the patient into the darkest places of trauma, and appreciate why this is important, as well as how these dynamics can be properly worked through and understanding the “rules” and logic of that area, then this is the best way of understanding what the patient is trying to communicate. In this way the analyst can address these pressures and work fruitfully, safely, and effectively with these most powerful, agonising, unbearable, and disruptive states of mind.

Davies and Frawley's example

Although they are addressing only some aspects of the phenomena I have been discussing, I would like to end this chapter by quoting Davies and Frawley at some length, describing the analytic deadlocks and disasters that may occur in working with patients who have been sexually abused as children (their paper is required reading for anyone working with trauma). In my experience such dynamics can apply whenever there has been early trauma, although that will manifest differently in the analytic relationship according to the particular early relational traumas. They write:

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