Abstract
Violence prevention programs can help children cope with trauma if effective strategies are developed to address youth victimization and children's exposure to domestic violence and trauma. Psychoanalysts are in a unique position to develop such primary and secondary prevention programs for children for whom violence is part of everyday life. An intense long-term relationship is an essential treatment ingredient for these profoundly troubled youngsters. In such a relationship, the therapist/analyst cannot react automatically to the inevitable hostile, destructive aggression that emerges in the treatment of severely traumatized children. A particularly key contribution by Osofsky is her discussion of the ubiquity of “countertransference every day in people who work with traumatized children.” Here I provide a clinical example of a failure that resulted from my own countertransference.