Unpacking and Reworking Trauma

ABSTRACT

In response to Dr. Tronick’s article on the evolution of responses to trauma, I explore the advantages of extending his study by differentiating between three types of trauma. I suggest that as analysts recognize chronic trauma that derives from pervasive racial and cultural prejudice, critical domains of social relevance open up for psychoanalytic consideration on levels of theory and practice. On a clinical level we are enabled to address suffering associated with social marginalization and neglect otherwise thought to be outside the realm of psychoanalytic applicability.

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

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Lauren Levine who invited me to write this discussion and helped me face up directly to the destructive effects of systemic prejudice, subtle and blatant.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Altman

Neil Altman is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with many years of experience in community based community work, in public clinics and in private practice. He is currently cochair of the section on Community Psychoanalysis of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is a member of the faculty at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, and at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis in Boston, He is an Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society, and Visiting faculty at Ambedkar University of Delhi, India. He is Editor Emeritus and Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and on the editorial staff of The Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, The Journal of Child Psychotherapy, and The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. He is author of Psychoanalysis in Times of Accelerating Cultural Change: Spiritual Globalization (2015), The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens, (2010), and White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2020). He is coauthor of Relational Child Psychotherapy (2002). Dr. Altman has published more than sixty articles in peer-reviewed journals.