Theories of narcissism and trauma

The more severe the pathology, the more one is likely to be dealing with sexual and aggressive fantasies and transferences based on actual traumas sustained by the child. Psychic trauma interferes with the normal structuring of experience. The psychotherapist needs to help transform traumatic registrations into more or less normal memories and tolerable affects. This organizing and structuring process, which brings with it increasing cohesion of self- and object-representations, corresponds to a crucial 'self-object' function of the therapist. The 'trauma paradigm' of psychopathology, with its implied organizational point of view, explains this structuring action of analytic therapy and bridges general psychoanalytic theory and special theories couched in object-relations language.