| Abstract: | Reviews the book, Wounded by reality: Understanding and treating adult onset trauma by Ghislaine Boulanger (see record 2007-04674-000). In this book, Boulanger closes the circle on psychoanalytic speculation about the significance of trauma to personality, and goes beyond this to add significantly to both theory and clinical practice. Rado's 1925 paper on dismissing abreaction for understanding and treating the effects of adult onset trauma, with Freud's agreement, pushed the psychoanalytic gaze inward to memories of past trauma (Etchegoyen, 1991, p. 446). It was assumed that childhood trauma determined the reactions to later ones in adulthood. The very concept of trauma was diluted to include sudden hardship or confusion, leaving adult onset horror in an undifferentiated place on the continuum of human misfortune. In this book, there is no doubt. Adults are traumatized when they face imminent and seemingly inescapable death. This book is the sixth in a series of books called "Psychoanalysis in a New Key" that Donnel Stern is editing for The Analytic Press. That new key is relational thinking. Boulanger uses it along with the latest information from neuroscience to forge a special new key for unlocking the frozen affect of adults who have survived only physically from the most extreme of trauma. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
