The Riggs Difference: Where Understanding Leads to Recovery
Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Trauma is developmental: Psychological suffering often stems from early relational failures and intergenerational grief.
- Narcissism reflects deprivation, not excess: Beneath self-centeredness lies a history of neglect and unmet needs.
- Metacognition builds resilience: Reflective awareness strengthens adaptability and empathy.
- Containment is relational: Healing occurs through shared understanding among clinicians, patients, and teams.
- Psychoanalysis transforms meaning: Through curiosity and creativity, patients can reclaim a coherent sense of self.
In a thought-provoking presentation, Riggs team leader and staff psychologist Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, explored the deep ties between trauma, identity, and human development. The lecture offered a rich exploration of how early relational failures shape our emotional lives—and how psychoanalysis can restore the capacity for reflection, meaning, and connection.
Understanding Trauma and Identity Through a Psychoanalytic Lens
Charles began by addressing the estrangement from self and others that defines modern psychological suffering. In an era of clinical labels and diagnostic reductionism, she argued, psychoanalysis offers a more humane framework for understanding character development and identity formation.
“Most people seeking treatment today,” Charles noted, “suffer from developmental impasses best understood through the lens of failed intergenerational mourning.”
These unprocessed emotional inheritances—what she called the transmission of trauma across generations—can impede growth and leave individuals vulnerable to shame, alienation, and relational instability.
Narcissism, Borderline Dynamics, and the Roots of Suffering
Charles distinguished between narcissistic and borderline patterns as developmental responses to early failures of attunement:
- Narcissistic structures arise when the child’s need for recognition is unmet, leading to an internal world where others are treated as “self-objects” rather than separate persons.
- Borderline configurations reflect a fragile but authentic relatedness—marked by emotional dysregulation, but also by potential for insight and change through empathic engagement.
In both cases, psychoanalysis provides a relational container where lost meanings can be recovered and new ones co-created.
Metacognition: The Reflective Bridge Between Self and Other
Central to Charles’s clinical work is metacognition—the ability to reflect on one’s own thoughts and recognize those of others. Drawing on data from the Austen Riggs Center’s Follow-Along Study, she explained how this capacity differentiates symptom trajectories across diagnostic groups.
Those with narcissistic traits often struggle to gain insight but can learn more adaptive behaviors, while borderline individuals may deepen self-understanding and emotional regulation over time.
“Recognizing the legitimacy of diverse perspectives,” Charles said, “is essential for adaptive interpersonal relationships.”
Metacognitive development, she emphasized, is not purely cognitive—it depends on trust, attunement, and shared meaning within the therapeutic relationship.
The Consulting Room as a Space for Re-creation
The psychoanalytic consulting room, Charles proposed, functions as a crucible for identity formation. It is a space where the analyst and patient co-construct meaning from lived experience. Through case examples, she illustrated how this process unfolds:
- Elizabeth, struggling with dysregulation, learned to find safety in reflection rather than reaction.
- Bob and John, both marked by obsessive and narcissistic defenses, began to access feeling through metaphor and dialogue.
- Roy rediscovered his creativity after learning that autonomy and relationship need not be mutually exclusive.
These stories reveal how psychoanalysis fosters embodied learning—the integration of feeling and thought that anchors identity.
Attunement, Containment, and the Therapeutic Team
Charles also addressed how psychoanalytic principles extend beyond the consulting room to team-based clinical environments like those at the Austen Riggs Center. When working with dysregulated individuals, the entire milieu shares in the emotional burden.
Containment, she noted, is both intrapersonal and communal. Recognizing and naming shared emotional experiences helps teams maintain empathy, regulate affect, and sustain curiosity amid distress.
“It’s not about blame—it’s about understanding the story,” she emphasized. “We can be responsible without being to blame.”
Psychoanalysis as a Creative Act
In closing, Charles framed psychoanalysis as an art of creative collaboration—a process of helping patients rediscover their internal capacities for meaning-making. By blending metaphor, empathy, and reflection, clinicians can invite patients to participate actively in the reconstruction of their life stories.
“Psychoanalysis, at heart, is a creative process,” she concluded. “How we help those who come to us discover their own internal capacities remains our greatest challenge and reward.”
To hear the full presentation and receive CE/CME credits, please visit the Trauma, Identity, and Development course page.
Related Resources
Course
Trauma, Identity, and Development
October 17, 2025
Free CE/CME course with Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP
Resource
Childhood and Memory: The River Running through Us
July 29, 2022
Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, writes about gaps left by trauma and neglect that have been active forces.
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