Unconscious Collusions and Radioactive Identifications: When an Analyst’s Personal Experience of a Traumatized Society Meets a Patient’s Developmental Trauma

Abstract

A case vignette of a woman with multiple developmental traumas is presented to illustrate the potential collusion of her self-protective retreats and powerful projections with the analyst’s own countertransference, which was colored by his transgenerational adaptation to a totalitarian political condition. The author, an analyst from the Czech Republic, explores his passive interpretative stance and extended capacity to tolerate the patient’s retreat and her fear of disclosing her true thoughts in light of “false adaptations” known in former Communist states. Psychoanalytic models of intrapsychic functioning of residents and psychoanalysts under the Communist regime are described. Finally, the author examines how his analytic functioning is impacted by his own ancestors’ adaptations, his own upbringing, and his own psychoanalytic training.

Keywords:

• countertransference collusion
• developmental trauma
• mutual enactment
• totalitarian object.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Holub

David Holub, MD, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and editor-in-chief and cofounder of the Review of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis journal (Revue pro psychoanalytickou psychoterapii a psychoanalýzu). He teaches at the Masaryk University, Brno and 1st Medical Faculty Charles University, Prague, and he has co-organized several international conferences, including Otto Fenichel and His Legacy (2015 and 2017) and the EFPP Group Conference Bridging Identities: The Clinical Impact of Groups (2009). Dr. Holub’s published worked has focused on the initial interview, infertility, supervision, and the psychodynamic aspects of a medical practice. He is in private practice at the Psychosomatic Clinic in Prague.