Treating Trauma: The Analyst’s Own Affect Regulation and Expression

Abstract

It can be argued that trauma is a universally occurring experience—an inescapable aspect of the human condition. With this in mind, one can expect that every psychoanalytic patient will present with some degree of trauma-related suffering, along with its aftermath of psychic splitting and dissociation. As an integral aspect of every analytic treatment, the analyst will, therefore, be required to work toward helping the patient gain access to previously walled-off affective experience and to participate in an intersubjective process through which the patient can better contain the affect, recognize it, bear it, make sense of it, and integrate it into an expanded, more inclusive and sturdier sense of self. In this intersubjective process, the analyst’s capacity to access, bear, modulate, process, and communicate her own affect—or the analyst’s own affect regulation—is of central importance, a thesis now supported by a growing array of research studies from diverse scientific disciplines. In this article, I summarize some of the research relevant to the complex processes of affect regulation and then discuss Dr. Stramba-Badiale’s case of Veronica with a focus on how the analyst’s own affect regulation contributed to the patient’s cure.

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Notes on contributors

Judith Guss Teicholz

Dr. Teicholz is faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis; and Harvard Medical School at Massachusetts General Hospital (1975–2000).