Trauma, Identity, and Development

with Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP

• Location: Virtual

• Source/ Event Link: Austen Riggs Center

“The most destructive force waylaying development in children comes from failures in mourning that leave parents unreliably available to attend to the needs of the child, the type of small-t trauma that impedes growth. Parental failures invite overwhelming experiences of helplessness that become precursors for later feelings of shame, humiliation and alienation. As Symington (1993) notes: “Narcissism is nearly always the product of trauma” (p. 73). 

In his early work, Freud was not thinking about trauma but rather theorizing about how we move from a preliminary self-focus towards appreciating our inherent need for others that underlies both resilience and the capacity to care. That capacity, as Winnicott highlights, requires our ability to stand as a separate self in relation to others who can also keep their own grounding. 

Recent psychoanalytic explorations shift from ideas of primary narcissism to focus on Freud’s later ideas regarding life and death drives, distinguishing between libidinal and destructive aspects. Whereas the libidinal focus is on humiliation at dependence, the destructive focus is on envy. Destructive envy can be highly organized and difficult to discern, presenting particular clinical challenges because any change is seen as weakness, and resisted. Maintaining the self-idealization requires vigilance and deception. 

Narcissism has become a catch-all phrase, referring to an almost sociopathic lack of care. The psychoanalytic literature, however, helps us distinguish between individuals who lead with their grandiosity and those who lead with their vulnerability. Whether the presentation is libidinal or aggressive, narcissistically-organized individuals pose particular problems in the treatment because of their difficulty in tolerating or even imagining an actual relationship with the analyst as a separate person because of the threat to their own subjectivity. Clinical illustrations will highlight some of the complexities of working with individuals whose development has been waylaid by the trauma of insufficient parental attunement.

Learning Objectives

• Participants will be able to describe one reason why narcissistic individuals may be more difficult to work with than those diagnosed as borderline.

• Participants will be able to describe clinical benefit of linking narcissism with early parental failures.

• Participants will be able to describe one way in which Sirois’ notion of “interpretations that touch” may be clinically useful in working with narcissistic individuals.”