Terrifying Transferences

How can therapists treat patients' primitive anxieties and overwhelming terrors that are not accessible to verbal interpretation or insight? In psychotherapy the traumas suffered in infancy are often reawakened, and reexperienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship. While they desperately seek attachment, their experience of connection is one of violation and humiliation. Their ways of attaching are at the center of what terrifies patients with early trauma and, in a successful therapy, they structure the development of the transference and come also to terrify the analyst. The therapist is confronted with humiliation and abuse from patients, who find behavioral ways to communicate their histories. These patients require a special connection, a new relational experience, before they can learn new relational paradigms. This book shows therapists how to understand the process of trauma re-creation, and move with the client through the reexperiencing of the early physical pain and psychological terror and the blaming of the therapist.

Disc. trauma re-creation & the client's focus on the thera- pist; working through the stages to recovery; case studies.

How can therapists treat patients' primitive anxieties and overwhelming terrors that are not accessible to verbal interpretation or insight? In psychotherapy the traumas suffered in infancy are often reawakened, and reexperienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship. These patients require a special connection, a new relational experience, before they can learn new relational paradigms. This book shows therapists how to understand the process of trauma re-creation, and move with the client through the reexperiencing of the early physical pain and psychological terror and the blaming of the therapist.

Lawrence E. Hedges, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Orange, California, specializing in the training of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. He is director of the Listening Perspectives Study Center and the founding director of the Newport Psychoanalytic Institute. He holds faculty appointments at the California Graduate Institute and the University of California, Irvine, Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Hedges holds Diplomates from The American Board of Professional Psychology and The American Board of Forensic Psychology. He is the author of numerous papers and books on the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.