Wounded by reality: emotional deprivation and unresolved trauma in psychoanalytical couple’s therapy

In this article, I will focus on highly conflictual couples with extensive emotional deprivation and unresolved trauma, which prevents them from developing healthy romantic relationships and overcoming the challenges entailed in any intimate attachment. I will describe how everyday interactions are experienced as threatening or even lethal movements between the partners. The question which arises in the psychoanalytical therapeutic process is how to help the couple tolerate the sensory reminders of the unresolved trauma as a necessary precursor to any process of symbolisation. In order to provide a safe enough therapeutic attachment bond, extensive time is dedicated to the emotional experience of self and the other in the here-and-now of the session, which validates the emotional experience of the couple as well as contains it. The therapy focuses on the transferential and countertransferential movements inspired by the matrix of the victim, abuser, and uninvolved witness (Davies & Frawley, 1994) to elaborate the intertwining of the unresolved trauma with the couple’s form of attachment. In order to illustrate my argument, I present two examples: one from a fictional narration and another from my clinical work.

Captain Aguilera and filicide: an attachment-based exploration

This article aims to explore a constellation of individual-attachment, family-attachment, and group-attachment experiences, as well as other psychosocial, cultural, and political factors, which contributed to the dual filicide perpetrated by Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro—a count, landowner, cavalryman, and propaganda press officer for General Francisco Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War. Learning from Luis Arias González and, above all, Paul Preston’s biographies of Captain Aguilera, the article will employ a combined methodology of historical investigation, psychiatric clinical formulations, and group analysis. In doing so, it will take into account a highly complex context of brutal group dynamics of national depression and exaltation, unresolved trauma, military rebellion, war, genocide, holocaust, and dictatorship.

Attachment, deadness, desire, and addictive buzz traps

In this article I describe those caught up in an increasingly common but worrying phenomenon, that of addictive states of mind, seen, for example, in obsessional use of video games or pornography. While the contemporary world has exacerbated the risks, addictive traits often originate in attempts to escape from an inner pain or deadness towards the false promise offered by the object of addiction. The article offers a different view of the dopaminergic system. It also looks at how the contemporary world is posing new challenges for people who have developed with such a propensity, and we will see how those prone to addictive states of mind struggle to bear certain emotional states, finding them overwhelming, and instead reach for a solution via their addiction.

Boarding school syndrome: reconsidered in social context and through the lens of attachment theory

I argue the time has come to expand the now recognised clinical diagnosis of boarding school syndrome to take account of its invisible precursors in the avoidant attachment patterns of British upper-class culture. This elite, comprising less than 1% of the population, has sustained fee-paying boarding “public” schools, and is sustained by them, in a remarkably effective nexus of power and influence. I propose to call this avoidant culture with its severe affective limits and entitled assumptions, “British upper-class complex trauma condition”. Until we can recognise it and understand it as a form of group trauma, we will not be able to deal with its grave incapacity when it comes to empathy with the lives of others. Like Bowlby1, I advocate the abolition of early boarding as a key part of transforming the condition’s psychosocial limitations, which profoundly impact us all.

Attachment-informed interventions with the perinatal population

With growing attention being paid to perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) in both medical and mental health settings, there is a need for further elaboration on meaningful and impactful treatments with this population. This article outlines some of the unique stressors and psychological states that come with pregnancy and parenting a newborn and infant. The concepts and experiences discussed include: primary maternal preoccupation (Winnicott, 1956), parental ambivalence, major changes to the physical body, and reorganisation of attachment representations and current family dynamics. Clinical material from therapy sessions with patients at a specialised perinatal centre is included in the discussion of using an approach informed by attachment theory (Bowlby, 1988).

Not so hysterical now? Psychotherapy, menopause, and hysterectomy

In the context of the body, the essentially female; wombs, menstrual cycles, and concurrent hormones, have seen women ascribed madness, insatiability, untrustworthiness, and danger. Female bodies have been identified in selective parts, considered in abstract, or envisaged as having overwhelming power over the mind. “Hysteria”, the problematic neurosis of uterine origin was at the heart of early psychoanalysis. This diagnosis enshrines a slippage from the physical to the fantastical, and ultimately to the denial of the lived reality of women’s and girl’s bodies. In apparent collusion with patriarchy the neglect of some female bodily experience is perpetuated in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Nowhere is this more evident than around menopause and hysterectomy (as experienced by either client or therapist). There has been little or no exploration of how practitioners might best support clients for whom menopause is significant, or how we might facilitate women before or after gynaecological surgery. It is as if removal and psychological loss of the same female body parts that our forebears used to so neatly differentiate, diagnose, and pathologise women are now not of note. I am interested as to how we as psychotherapists reclaim female body narratives from this outdated theoretical paradigm to best serve clients experiencing menopause, gynaecological surgery, and mid life in the twenty-first century.

The attachment antecedents of shame: mothers’ representations of the shamed self

This study was designed to explore the intergenerational roots of shame in the context of attachment. The sample comprised sixty-nine mothers with four- and five-year-old children (54 girls, M = 58 months) drawn from a study of parenting risk. The mothers (age range 25–48) were culturally diverse, educated, partnered, and middle to upper-middle class. Mothers completed the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP) (George & West, 2012) and children completed the Attachment Doll Play Assessment (ADPA) (Solomon et al., 1995). The dyad was also videotaped interacting with a realistic baby doll and maternal behaviour was rated using Britner et al.’s (2005) maternal scales. The authors developed a coding system to capture three shame-related variables from mothers’ narratives of parent–child conflict in response to one of the AAP stimuli (Child in Corner): 1) evidence of shame; 2) parental socialisation actions; and 3) parental efforts to regulate the child’s shame. Results showed that three-quarters of mothers referred to implicit or explicit shame, but socialisation depicting shame was unrelated to child attachment security. Most mothers described harsh socialisation practices and incomplete efforts to repair the child’s shame. Only mothers of securely attached children described socialisation actions to emotionally repair the relationship. The shame measures were partially validated with the maternal parent–child interaction observation rating variables. The utility and limitations of the new measures are discussed in terms of their potential usefulness to research, clinical assessment, and treatment.

The antecedents and consequences of disorganised attachment and dissociation

Attachment researchers theorise that the primary antecedent of dissociation is disorganised attachment. However, the family and social contexts of this parent–child relationship are frequently ignored even though they play an important role in determining whether the unresolved attachment of the parent actually leads to the role confusion characteristic of disorganised attachment and dissociation in the child. This article will address first how the dynamics leading to disorganised attachment and dissociation are dependent on the larger family and social contexts; and second how both unresolved attachment and dissociation in the adolescent or adult are often maintained through the choice of a partner, the dissociative symptoms themselves and other social conditions to which these individuals are frequently exposed. Two case studies will illustrate this thesis. Finally, implications for treatment will be explored.