Trauma, Identity and Development

In our consulting rooms, as in the external world, we find a prevalence of developmental failures that leave people suffering from isolation and feelings of failure. The psychoanalytic and developmental literatures teach us that the most destructive force waylaying development in children comes from failures in mourning that leave parents unreliably available to attend to the needs of the child, the the type of small “t” trauma that impedes growth. Parental failures invite overwhelming experiences of helplessness that become precursors of later feelings of shame, humiliation and alienation. As Symington (1993) notes: “Narcissism is nearly always the product of trauma.” (p. 73).

In his early work, Freud was not thinking about trauma but rather theorizing about how we move from a preliminary self-focus towards appreciating our inherent need for others that underlies both resilience and the capacity to care. That capacity, as Winnicott highlights, requires our ability to stand as a separate self in relation to others who can also keep their own grounding. We can see ways in which the consulting room becomes the crucible within which the battle to become sufficiently separate to be able to use others in the service of one’s own development takes place. Whether we think in terms of Bion’s capacity to dream or Lacan’s recognition of the need to discover one’s own desire, psychoanalysis offers us metaphors through which to gird ourselves as we face the very worthy challenge of helping lost souls to discover themselves.

Narcissism has become a catch-all phrase, referring to an almost sociopathic lack of care. The psychoanalytic literature, however, helps us distinguish between individuals who lead with their grandiosity and those who lead with their vulnerability. Whether the presentation is libidinal or aggressive, narcissistically-organized individuals pose particular problems in the treatment because of their difficulty in tolerating or even imagining an actual relationship with the analyst as a separate person because of the threat to their own subjectivity. Clinical illustrations will highlight some of the complexities of working with individuals whose development has been waylaid by the trauma of insufficient parental attunement.