Home Societal / Political Authority Personality Disorders, Attachment, and National Trauma: A Psychosociological Approach to Psychodynamic Therapy

Personality Disorders, Attachment, and National Trauma: A Psychosociological Approach to Psychodynamic Therapy

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Historical trauma creates a unique constellation of behavioral and emotional issues that are rooted in this idea of loyalty. It becomes the source of identity and the fabric of culture: I see this on a much smaller scale in my work with addicts and their families. There is a perverse cultural pride in remaining a part of the community of addicts, enforced beyond a mere psychological reading by addicts who come from families in which their parents and even grandparents were addicts. But historical trauma works differently. The trauma of the possibility of total physical annihilation mixes with the dangers off moral destruction or revenge through secular success. This threat of annihilation creates an internal split, a schizophrenic way of being, that adds to the splits already within Jewry. The disaster narrative that sets you apart from your peers also sets you apart from your era. You are not your own contemporary.

The genetic, cultural, and behavioral transmissions shift back and forth. They switch places throughout our uneasy encounter with the present. Part of us still lives in the shtetl or the ghetto or the internment camp or on the plantation. It is encoded in our DNA. When an entire nation has been traumatized, there is something that stands out in the families of those who have specific trauma that transcends the historic communal narrative A probable model for a narrative-emotional response loop in borderline patients might take the following route: The patient experiences something (“the story”) and has to make a series of choices. These choices lead to the way that the story of that experience is represented to themselves narratively. This is the first step in being able to “speak” of it, categorize it, and file it away into the “portfolio” of the self. The historical identity and emotional memory have become a part of the master narrative of the self.

The task of initially processing the experience and assigning a category to it that is congruent with the rest of their historical identity also requires processing, containing and rejecting all of the other possible categories and interpretations. This necessitates a default, because the possibilities for conceiving of this narrative are limitless. Sorting through the other possible narratives is an overwhelming task for those with a borderline organization of the self. To compensate for this, the emotional response and its narrative result begin to develop a shortcut. Based on my work with addicted individuals, I believe that in borderline patients, this shortcut is stuck at a place of un-integration.

This “un-integration” might be part of the explanation for the tangential organization and labile affect that prevails when these patients try to relate a linear narrative experience. This also helps to explain the dramatically heightened awareness these patients have of the most minute shift in our own affective mirroring of patients’ narratives. The patients’ already-fractured identities are thus reinforced by their “reading’ or “misreading” of therapist responses. It is for this reason that the therapist or counselor must maintain a steady, neutral affect, while simultaneously being empathic, warm and receptive. Too much or too little affect will both be magnified by the patient’s subjectivity. It also causes the patient to either fear engulfment and hence retreat from the dyad, or sense an abandonment that will activate a depressive, dependent position.

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