The Nature of Trauma and Dissociation

Shrinking the shadow of the tsunami: healing and growth as the interlocking rewards of a psychoanalytic relationship

Philip Bromberg here proposes that the process of psychoanalyzis is mediated by participating in a complex relationship that enables the patient to reclaim his or her dissociated self-states. Trauma is defined as a precipitous, psychological event that disrupts the patterns of meaning that constitute the person’s overarching experience of self. The work of analysis is the co-creation of a relational unconscious, via state-sharing, that enables restoration of links between dissociated aspects of self so that the conditions for intra-psychic conflicts and resolution can be present.