Unlaid Ghosts: A Discussion Of Maria Grazia Oldoini's “Abusive Relations and Traumatic Development: Marginal Notes on a Clinical Case”

Abstract

Maria Grazia Oldoini’s paper, “Abusive Relations and Traumatic Development: Marginal Notes on A Clinical Case,” is a comprehensive treatise on the effects of trauma on the ability to form a sense of Self where the patients’s entire experience in the world is not unduly oriented towards the satisfaction of the other’s abusive and impinging needs. She postulates the search for a transformational object as the tragic core factor driving the repetitive traumatic enactments characteristic of people like her patient Greta. The author locates this search in the repetition of what she calls a “traumatic holding environment,” which I find to be an intriguing, but problematic, idea. I offer an alternative explanation based on a careful review of Winnicott’s holding concept and Bion’s theory of thinking.

Keywords:

• Bion
• Ferenzci
• holding
• Winnicott
• trauma
• traumatophilia
• tranformational object

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Abusive Relations and Traumatic Development: Marginal Notes on a Clinical Case

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Response to Commentaries on “Abusive Relations and Traumatic Development: Marginal Notes on a Clinical Case”

Notes

1 I use the term “self-interest” rather than agency, which as Akhtar (2009) points out, refers to something that is conscious. The drive to protect one's self-interest in identification with the aggressor is unconscious.

2 Oldoini uses the term “alien implants,” though in the English translation of Ferenczi's Clinical Diaries, he uses the terms “alien will” or “alien transplants” (see Ferenczi 1932, pp. 18, 81-82, 111).

3 In this way, Oldoini's use of traumatophilia clearly resembles Branschaft's (2007) pathological accommodations. A satisfactory analysis of their similarities, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

4 According to Freud (1915, p. 165), “If he has been guided by the calculation that this compliance on his part will ensure his domination over his patient and thus enable him to influence her to perform the tasks required by the treatment, and in this way to liberate herself permanently from her neurosis—then experience would inevitably show him that his calculation was wrong. The patient would achieve her aim, but he would never achieve his. What would happen to the doctor and the patient would only be what happened, according to the amusing anecdote, to the pastor and the insurance agent. The insurance agent, a freethinker, lay at the point of death and his relatives insisted on bringing in a man of God to convert him before he died. The interview lasted so long that those who were waiting outside began to have hopes. At last the door of the sick-chamber opened. The free-thinker had not been converted; but the pastor went away insured.”

5 Indeed, Oldoini writes that Greta, and by implication traumatized people like her, “would only ever be able to find-traumatophilically-a traumatic and abusive love object.” In my experience, these patients are capable of finding a wide variety of objects, from frankly abusive ones on whom they cling, to non-abusive ones who's every misstep is felt to be a form of abuse, and to whom they also cling. This speaks more to the permeability of these patients than predisposition to a particular choice in object.

6 I would consider Oldoini's “survival strategies” a traumatic organization or beta screen.

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Rodrigo Barahona

Rodrigo Barahona, Psya. D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England (PINE), and a faculty member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Dr. Barahona is a board member of the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies, an associate board member of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, an editorial board member of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association.