THE ATTACHMENT-TRAUMA COMPLEX

摘要

Trauma is, in essence, a disillusionment, a radical revocation of the secure innocence fostered in healthy primary attachment. To some degree it works like reality-based individuation—the primary attachment figure becomes less magical, less potent, less able to draw the vicissitudes of life under its benign spell. But normal individuation driven by the experience of the real is a series of minor assaults upon the mirrored, secure grandiose self that leave the core tonus of security intact. The traumatic event breeches that tonus and so damages the internal representation of primary attachment. Initiated in trauma, then, is a process of primary loss and rage, and since trauma seems to nullify the assumption of safety founded upon early object relatedness, this rage seizes upon the fabric of relatedness—rage at the parent and at all attachment figures, or symbolically transferred to a rage at God, or a diffuse rage at the world, or a rage at the traumatizing object itself, with that object taking on an omnipotent negativity which is an inversion or shadow of the nurturing parent's positivity.