I Can’t Think: Past Trauma in Present Time

ABSTRACT

This article examines the sociopolitical environment and how it enters the treatment room, impacting both analyst and patient. The focus is on clinical work with a patient who wears a binder and has considered top surgery but fears her wish for top surgery is connected to her history of sexual abuse. After delinking the abuse and the wish for surgery from each other, memories of abuse are freed and flood the patient, making it difficult for her to think or speak in session. While working intensely with this patient, the violent White supremacist Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. The president’s description of “fine people on both sides” had a destabilizing effect on the analyst, evoking her family’s Holocaust history. The analyst uses these experiences to connect with her patient and to reach for a sense of possibility in order to “dream ourselves forward.”