Playing with boundaries.
(1999)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Spezzano
(2001)
This is about a small boy and his >imaginary< friend, who happens to be a gorilla – a friend the boy considers very real indeed. It is also about the fact that no part of the self, including every child's relationship to his own >gorilla,< is ever >reasoned< out of existence. It becomes, instead, >not really real,< because it has had to be relegated to >not really me< in order for the child to preserve his attachment bond with significant others. However, it will continue to make its presence known through being relationally enacted, dissociatively, in ways that eventually become repetitious enough and painful enough to bring the child (now an adult) into our office years later. As analysts, our job at that point becomes one of trying to restore the connection between the little boy and his gorilla in the face of intense pressure by the now >grown-up< patient to keep them apart and to discourage the therapist from trying to bring these old friends back from dissociation into the >really real.< The source of therapeutic action that allows this reunion to take place is discussed conceptually and described in clinical vignettes.
This paper examines psychic trauma as experience so shockingly strange that it exceeds the threshold for cognitive processing and begins to flood the mind with unintegratable affect that threatens to disorganize the internal template on which one's experience of self-coherence, self-cohesiveness, and self-continuity depends. A detailed clinical vignette illustrates how the unprocessed >not-me< experience held by a dissociated self-state as an affective memory without an autobiographical memory of its traumatic origin >haunts< the self. It remains a ghostly horror even in an otherwise successful psychoanalysis unless a new perceptual reality is created between patient and analyst that alters the narrative structure maintaining the dissociation as though the past were still a present danger. The analyst's making optimal use of dissociative processes in an intersubjective and interpersonal context enables the patient more readily to self-regulate affect in those areas of implicit memory where trauma has left its mark the dissociated ghosts of >not-me< are thus persuaded, little-by-little, to cease their haunting and participate more and more actively and openly as self-reflective, self-expressive parts of >me.<