THE CONCEPT OF CUMULATIVE TRAUMA IN TIMES OF COVID-19: COULD KHANS THEORY BECOME USEFUL AGAIN?

"The paper discusses whether the psychoanalytic concept of Cumulative Trauma could be a valuable theoretical contribution in understanding possible traumatization’s of children in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, as they may quite often face a multiple stressed parent during a lockdown, who’s parental function is on the verge breaching. This concept of trauma as established by British Psychoanalyst Masud Khan in 1963 was hardly taken into account in recent trauma research and it has seen little discussion in psychodynamic literature; if at all, it has been used as a merely descriptive category, without considering the suspension of the parental care function, which was identified as the decisive traumatogenic factor for the child’s traumatization. The paper begins with a recapitulation of the original theory and then moves on to linking the Cumulative Trauma to current research contexts (attachment, mentalization, developmental trauma disorder). Finally, the relevance of the concept for parenting in times of the Covid-19 pandemic is explored on the basis of a short clinical case example."