Moses and Monotheism

For several decades the conceptualization and treatment of mental health problems, including psychosis, have been dominated by a rather narrow focus on genes and brain functions. Psychosocial factors have been relegated to mere triggers or exacerbators of a supposed genetic predisposition. This paper advocates a return to the original stressvulnerability model proposed by Zubin and Spring in 1977, in which heightened vulnerability to stress is not, as often wrongly assumed, necessarily genetically inherited, but can be acquired via adverse life events. There is now a large body of research demonstrating that child abuse and neglect are significant causal factors for psychosis. Ten out of eleven recent general population studies have found, even after controlling for other factors, including family history of psychosis, that child maltreatment is significantly related to psychosis. Eight of these studies tested for, and found, a dose-response. Interpreting these findings from psychological and biological perspectives generates a genuinely inte grated bio-psycho-social approach as originally intended by Zubin and Spring. The routine taking of trauma histories from all users of mental health services is recommended, and a staff training program to facilitate this is described.

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Child Maltreatment and Psychosis: A Return to a Genuinely Integrated Bio-Psycho-Social Model

This essay charts the origins, influences, and evolution of the relational tradition in contemporary psychoanalysis. Considering the theoretical and philosophical influences from nineteenth-century...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003065111416655

The Relational Tradition : Landscape and Canon

The purpose of this feminist interpretive study was to portray the experience of women thriving after childhood maltreatment (CM) through personal narratives. An interdisciplinary team conducted multiple in-depth interviews of 44 women survivors of CM who identified themselves as successful and doing well. The interviews focused on "what worked" and "what did not" with the aim of exploring aftereffects of CM; strengths and strategies; interactions helpful in overcoming abuse; and related sociopolitical contexts. Narrative analyses revealed a distinct, dynamic process of becoming resolute characterized by six dimensions that were not sequential steps but characteristics, actions, and interactions. This study offers a new understanding of the experience of women gaining solid footing in their lives, the peace of knowing the abuse is over, and power to move in an upward trajectory.

Thriving as becoming resolute in narratives of women surviving childhood maltreatment.

Work on the transgenerational transmission of trauma refers to unspoken stories across generations, but the actual mode of transmission has remained somewhat mysterious. Utilizing examples from her own life, the author illustrates how attachment patterns are a primary mode of transmission of trauma. When trauma revisits a person transgenerationally through dysregulated and disrupted attachment patterns, it is within the child's empathic attunement and search for a parental bond that the mode of transmission can be found. This will become the texture of traumatic attachment: how it feels to this child to feel connected to the parent.

The texture of traumatic attachment: presence and ghostly absence in transgenerational transmission

History beyond trauma : whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent

Histoire et trauma : la folie des guerres

Following the tracks of the pioneers of the psychoanalysis of schizophrenia, who discovered the singularity of transference in such cases and, during the wars, among traumatized soldiers, we came to the conclusion that trauma and psychosis belong to the same field of destruction of the symbolic order, that is, an area of death, where time stops, where there is no other, except for a ruthless agency that erases truth and trust. In that field, patient and analyst are co-researchers, exploring and challenging the possible existence of a reliable other as a positive outcome. Such an event “happens in a few sessions” – as described by the late Martin Cooperman, psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center and veteran of the Pacific wars – “but it takes many years to get there.” We will give examples of some critical sessions, when time starts to flow again. They take place at the crossroad of the patient's and of the analyst's story with the catastrophes of History.

Jean-Max Gaudillière

Papers

History beyond trauma : whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent

Histoire et trauma : la folie des guerres

Stoppage of time in schizophrenia: Similarities to the field of war trauma

History beyond trauma: whereof one cannot spea k... thereof

The psychoanalysis of psychosis at the crossroads of individual stories and of history