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Into the Darkest Places: Early Relational Trauma and Borderline States of Mind book cover

1st Edition

Into the Darkest Places Early Relational Trauma and Borderline States of Mind

By Marcus West Copyright 2016
    360 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book explores the roots of borderline states of mind in early relational trauma and shows how it is possible, and necessary, to visit 'the darkest places' in order to work through these traumas. This is despite the fact that re-experiencing such traumas is unbearable for the patient and they naturally want to enlist the analyst in ensuring that they will never be experienced again. This is the backdrop for the extreme pressures and roles that are constellated in the analysis that can lead to impasse or breakdown of the analytic relationship. The author explores how these areas can be negotiated safely and that, whilst drawing heavily on recent developments in attachment, relational, trauma and infant development theory, an analytic attitude needs to be maintained in order to integrate these experiences and allow the individual to feel, finally, accepted and whole. The book builds on Freud's views of repetition compulsion and re-enactment and develops Jung's concept of the traumatic complex.

    Chapter One: Early relational trauma and borderline states of mind; Chapter Two: The clinical picture and the traditional psychoanalytic understandings of borderline phenomena; Chapter Three: A brief outline of trauma theory; Chapter Four: The relational and attachment perspective; Chapter Five: Trauma, complex, and narcissistic defences of the core self—from fight and flight to personality organisation; Chapter Six: Internal working models on different levels and in direct and reversed forms; Chapter Seven: Into the darkest places: microanalysis of the analytic relationship—intersubjectivity, co-construction, and re-enactment; Chapter Eight: Broad and flexible ego-functioning and the core self—the ego–self axis and ps–dp; Chapter Nine: Idealisation and the longing for paradise—relinquishing the wish for an idealised, conflict-free relationship; Chapter Ten: Bringing it all together—an extended clinical example; Chapter Eleven: The pressures on the analyst—being human and bearing to be inhuman; Chapter Twelve: The analyst’s journey and the defeat of the analyst’s ego—Orpheus and Eurydice and the journey through the underworld; Chapter Thirteen: Trauma and the analytic attitude; Chapter Fourteen: When the earth swallows you up—shame, regression, and the collapse response; Chapter Fifteen: In thrall to the spectre of death—suicidality, submission, and collapse; Chapter Sixteen: Dissociation and dissociative identity disorder; Chapter Seventeen: The body remembers—working analytically with the body; Chapter Eighteen: Jung’s early relational trauma and spiritual experience; Chapter Nineteen: Summary and conclusion—emerging from trauma and returning to everyday life

    Biography

    Marcus West is a Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology in private practice in Sussex, England. He is the author of a number of papers, one of which was joint winner of the Michael Fordham Prize 2004. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and is currently Chair of Psychotherapy Sussex. He is author of three books: 'Feeling, Being and the Sense of Self', 'Understanding Dreams in Clinical Practice', and 'Into the Darkest Places'.

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