The Confusional Link

A Fireside Chat : "The Confusional Link" presented by Dr. Judy K.Eekhoff

Working with patients who have been traumatized as infants and young children can be confusing for the therapist who is accustomed to working in the symbolic order. In order to cope with traumatic, psychic overwhelm, they have retreated from object relations and continue to relate to others concretely as things or functions. Their relations are body relations, consisting of unconscious symbiotic union with others. Since often trauma survivors become adept in the world, becoming well educated and finding professional jobs, their concreteness and difficulty processing emotion may go unnoticed. They display a pseudo-maturity and pseudo-object relations.

For therapists and analysts working with them, their somatic relational process can be confusing and disorienting. We ourselves frequently report being confused by not being able to find meaning in their words or emotion in their narratives. Confusion then is uncomfortable and frightening, sometimes eliciting in the analyst a need for an immediate answer, an immediate understanding. When that does not appear in the analyst’s confused mind, unmediated affect such as rage or extreme maternal care, intense love or violent hate, can arise inside the analyst. This adds to the confusion and disturbance, while the violent affects and emotions seemingly create an illusion of certainty. If the analyst can learn to value the confusion as information, containment of previously unrepresented experience can result in the development of a three-dimensional analytic space and be internalized by the patient.

Participants will:

1. Learn to differentiate a confusional object from a transitional object.

2. Recognize a somatic defense as found in ‘language as action’.

3. Appreciate the value of pathological mimicry.

Please Register here: 

https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/kp968t7

Questions?
Carol _ NPSI Admin admin@npsi.us.com