Book description
This book skillfully combines autobiographical stories with clear
psychoanalytical theories. During her childhood, the author experienced
the Holocaust and was left understandly traumatised by it. It was her
desire to confront this trauma that led her to psychoanalysis. For
decades, the coherence of psychoanalysis seemed to be threatened by the
conflicting thinking of many psychoanalytical colleagues about trauma
and trauma affect, and also about the influence of external reality on
the psychic reality discovered by Freud. However, Marion Oliner counters
this potential conflict with her innovative theoretical integration,
combined with remarkable conceptual outcomes and treatment techniques.
This book spans the author's work over the last fifteen years on the
impact of external reality on psychic reality. During this period many
analysts, especially in the English-speaking countries and Germany,
where historic events loomed large in the lives of their patients, have
turned from the exclusive emphasis on psychic reality to greater
attention to the traumatic impact of external reality. Considering that
this has led to a body of psychoanalytic writings in which events are
used to give a name to the pathology, incest survivor, Holocaust
survivor, transmission of trauma, to name a few, it has implicitly
created two categories of patients: patients who, because of their
failed solutions for conflict, are regarded as active agents in their
own suffering, and those who are victimized by events they endured
passively; thus implicitly taking away from the second group the focus
on conflicting motivations. This in turn has led to the adoption of some
of Freud's concepts that lack a dynamic dimension. First among those is
the repetition compulsion which supposedly causes events to be repeated
because they happened. The concept has its place, but, if not properly
understood, risks by-passing the analysis of unconscious guilt as a
motivating factor in repetition. These factors have not been
sufficiently explored in the analytic literature, and over the years the
author has written a number of articles that try to distinguish
important elements that contribute to the psychoanalytic exploration of
trauma. This book is an important summation and further development of
that work.
