Trauma child on the couch: transference, introjection, identification

This paper attempts to explore some of the psychic processes at work with patients whom I identify as the "trauma child". The term is a metaphor rather than a diagnosis of "traumatisation", to indicate patients particularly resistant to maturational processes. They feel blocked and thereby find it difficult to evolve as creative adults. As opposed to the "traumatised" child no particular distressing event can be identified as a cause for emotional suffering. The malaise is often "low key" or silent but functions as a saboteur, undermining satisfactory existence. The trauma child is constantly seduced by regressive functioning and bound by numerous strategies of resistance of reality and often incapable of relinquishing the boundless pleasure of omnipotence. On the basis of my clinical work with the "trauma child", I will explore the different processes of introjection in transference and counter transference, paying particular attention to the dynamics of identification between analyst and patient and its implications for object relations. Instead of "healthy" identification with the other, taking account of difference and reality, the mode of object relations can be that of "pathological imitation" based on fantasies of oral incorporation. A kind of regressive defense against "mature" relationships; it is an attempt to acquire a substitute identity through magical imitation. Analytical listening, associative work and interpretation stimulate maturational processes within the patient and help him/her to let go of immature relational modes fixated in childhood.