Archives for : trauma theory

Dori Laub has a bad trauma theory, but he has still made a contribution

Dori Laub has a bad trauma theory, but he has still made a contribution.

Laub concludes an autobiographical essay, “On leaving home and the flight from trauma,” with the following lines.

Perhaps it is only through resisting the temptation and the pressures of becoming the same that he [the therapist] can listen to the patients as they really are, without succumbing to the generalizing effects of theory and the homogenizing produced by fashion and by political correctness. (2013a, pp 579-580)

Laub has adopted some of the most fashionable theories of trauma.  At the same time, it is hard to imagine that he is not a good therapist to the traumatized.  I conclude this from the way he writes about his patients, as well as having seen him interview survivors for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University.

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Trauma theory and Melanie Klein

B0000766Melanie Klein’s clinical researches on early childhood led her to postulate that the traumatic pathogenic situation par excellence is the overriding triumph of the death instinct. (Hernandez)

Trauma theory poses a problem for Melanie Klein, and Melanie Klein poses a problem for trauma theory. From a Kleinian perspective, the traumatic experience is not traumatic in itself. The traumatic experience is traumatic to the degree that it activates the fear of annihilation and destruction that is always waiting within, the haunting presence of the death instinct. The death instinct, in turn, gives rise to primitive defenses. Fearing death, the traumatized person projects his fear outward into persecutory objects and people, who then come back to haunt him.

A Kleinian theory of trauma in effect blames the victim. It is as though the Kleinian therapist said

Getting run over, almost dying, and spending six months in the hospital recovering isn’t the real source of your trauma. The real source of your trauma is the hate and aggression you feel toward what we call good objects, the people who really care for you. Your PTSD is so extreme right now because you fear you cannot protect the good from your own anger and hate.

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