Double Binds, Unhealing Wounds: Discussion of “Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequelae of Identification with Parental Negation”

Abstract

In his “Airless Worlds” paper, Steven Stern (this issue) is pinpointing and articulating what the author of this discussion has found to be one of the most challenging problems in working with certain psychotherapy patients – the relentlessly enduring obsession some traumatized people have with their traumatizing parent. In an agonized expression of disorganized attachment, these patients are held hostage by their unrelenting anger with and despair about the “negating” parent they have or had. Stern vividly describes how the negated, toxically objectified adult child, trapped in an externally derived identification, cannot mourn the tragedy of not having (or not having had) an affirming parent. The author extends Stern’s generative thinking to include reflections on the role of psycho-education in clinical work with this group; and further ways of helping these patients develop a durable experience of a self of their own.

Notes

¹ I am grateful to Melinda Upshur for her helpful reading of this paper, and for obtaining her patient’s consent to be quoted here.

² Aron and Star (2012) and Wachtel (2010) have persuasively critiqued the exclusion of various therapeutic tools, such as psycho-education, and the exclusive privileging of interpretation, in psychoanalytic clinical work.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Shaw

Daniel Shaw, LCSW, is the author of Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, for the Relational Perspectives Series from Routledge. He is Faculty and Clinical Supervisor at The National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), New York and is in private practice in New York City and Nyack, NY.