The Slap: Playing with Reality in Discussing Ed Tronick’s “Trauma Never Occurs Only Once”

ABSTRACT

Trauma is neither a one-time only event nor something that can be completely divorced from the ongoing flow of living. Tronick’s developmental perspective integrates trauma into the entire spectrum of engaging where the momentum of rupture and repair and the unending processes of meaning-making link the seemingly irreconcilable trauma of a slap with the childhood game of peek-a-boo. Psychoanalysis also understands trauma as repetitive and further, encounters it in the unique setup of the analytic session. From this perspective, trauma is neither simply a process that is objectively observed nor something reduced to an exchange between first-person subjects. The essence of the unconscious process of trauma in psychoanalysis is found in how the tear in the fabric of being is encountered as an intersubjective phenomenon, where change occurs through creative and reparative play that engenders more flexible and novel modes of relating emerging from an embodied and mooded ground of experience that is fundamentally shared.

This article refers to:

Trauma Never Occurs Only Once: Being Traumatized by a Slap is Like Making Meaning of the Game of Peek-a-Boo

View responses to this article:

The Repetition of the Quotidian: Moods, Culture, and Trauma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Tronick’s work is central but also accompanied by developmental and psychoanalytic researchers who have published with Tronick and separately. Terry Brazelton (1969), D. N. Stern (1969), Lou Sander (2008), Bessel Van der Kolk (2014), Beebe and Lachmann (2002), Colwyn Trevarthen (2005), Alexandra Harrison (2017), Karlen Lyons-Ruth (2002), Joseph Lichtenberg (2015), Bruce Perry (2008), Stephen Seligman (2017), and the joint publications of the Boston Process Change Study Group (2002) are an incomplete list of contributors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Foehl

Jack Foehl, Ph.D. is Joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is President of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute where he is Supervising and Training Analyst and is Supervisor and Faculty Member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and Lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Jack is author of numerous articles on the theory, description, and work of psychoanalytic process emphasizing lived experience in the analytic setting. He is in private practice in Cambridge, MA.