Psychic Trauma and Traumatic Object Loss

Psychic trauma and traumatic neurosis. Play therapy with a four-year-old boy.

On: object loss, renewed mourning, and psychic change in Jane Austen's Persuasion.

Austen's extraordinary realism in depicting the dynamic internal processes which follow on the heroine's loss in Persuasion becomes clear in the light of a psychoanalytic understanding of mourning. Persuasion dramatizes the effects of a mother's death in adolescence as these come into play at the time of the heroine's separation from her fiancée and her later mourning. The thesis of this paper ...

Traumatic grief: a case of loss-induced trauma.

A 59-year-old widow came for treatment of her depressive symptoms in response to a media announcement recruiting subjects for bereavement research. The patient described a series of difficulties and symptoms that had begun when her husband became terminally ill and that had persisted during the 8 years since his death. Despite this patient’s claim that “grieving is for other people, not for me,...

Life within death: towards a metapsychology of catastrophic psychic trauma.

In this paper the author offers a phenomenology and a metapsychology for the effects on the mind of catastrophic psychic trauma, defined as the reaction of the psyche to an utterly external event, which the person is helpless to resist, and against which there is no possible defense. The author affirms that the experience of 'infinite affliction' produces a radical break in being which disartic...

Psychic Seizures as Focal Manifestations in Post-Traumatic Brain Disease *

Although Hughlings Jackson's name has become associated in our minds with focal motor seizures, Jackson himself did not limit his views to the motor manifestations alone as an example of localized special functions of the different parts of the brain. Indeed, to him, it was just as logical to expect sensory as well as motor discharges, and mental as well as physical ones. It is, nevertheless, q...