An account of a little boy's attempt to recover from the trauma of abuse

Abstract

This paper follows the progress of intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy OW to a severely abused and deprived 5-yeusld boy in the first eighteen months of treatment. It attempts to show how certain adjustments to technique need to be considered to allow such a traumatized child to benefit from the held that is available. When a young child has encountered profound setbacks to early developmental process the work in therapy must account for the absences of more ordinary communication and die presence of features which are full of mistrust and emotional bleakness. The role and the personality of the therapist arc challenged in ways which demand an approach which may be considered unusually active in order to try to shape some meaning for the child without an emotional vocabulary.

Key Words:

• Trauma;
• identification;
• psychotherapeutic technique;
• abuse;
• memory.