Abstract yellow flowers painting
CPD Credits
3
Event Type
Recorded Event
Location
Your TR Together account
Standard
£67.50
Trainee/NHS
£57.40
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Abstract yellow flowers painting

Early Relational Trauma, Fusion and Confusion

Facilitating containment of unrepresented experience

With Dr Judy Eekhoff

Dr Eekhoff’s workshop focuses on the eruption of confusion in the consulting room when working with clients who have experienced severe disorganisation in their early relationships. Judy elaborates how the disruption of normal projective identifications, may lead the individual to psychically ‘merge’ with their primary carers creating an unconscious fusion and primitive organisational development. This type of internal structure can allow adult patients a pseudo-maturity covering up a depth of disorganisation, chaos and confusion which can erupt when a distinction of minds enters awareness particularly in relationship with the therapist.

For therapists and analysts working in the somatic relational process can be disorienting. Analysts and therapists frequently report confusion in their thinking by not being able to find meaning in a patient’s words or emotion and in their narratives. This confusion is uncomfortable and frightening, sometimes eliciting in the analyst a need for an immediate answer, an immediate understanding. When that does not appear in the analyst’s confused mind, unmediated affect such as rage or extreme maternal care, intense love or violent hate, can arise inside the analyst. These experiences contribute to the confusion and disturbance, while the violent affects and emotions seemingly create an illusion of certainty.

This seminar offers an opportunity to think about how the therapist or analyst can learn to be with the elicited confusion. This challenging process can give rise to the containment of previously unrepresented experience which can result in the development of a three-dimensional analytic space and be internalized by the patient who no longer need rely on fusional states for safety. Through the seminar there will be lectures and a Q&A with our speaker and colleagues that attended the live event.

 

Programme

Introductions and Zoom Housekeeping
The Confusional Object

In this first session Dr Eekhoff will describe how normal projective identifications are disrupted due to early trauma. A patient might, in phantasy, become the person they are with instead.  This silent and unconscious fusion enables a primitive organisation to develop that provides structure and seemingly results in a capacity to function procedurally in the world. Whenever this phantasy is threatened by relationship, confusion results. Neither the patient nor the therapists can discern who is who. The confusion becomes manifest in a variety of ways, for example, in passivity, poor memory, or in a difficulty making decisions. It also appears via unconscious mimicry which includes a primal identification.

Q&A
Break
The Play of Identifications

In a healthy psychic world, our identifications serve to build internal structure and create our personalities and our identities. In addition, they serve to link us emotionally with those we consciously love and admire, creating an internal and external community that is cohesive and integrated. As defenses, much like language is a defense, identifications create a background of safety. Our clients may do this by unconsciously splitting themselves and their objects into black and white categories. These can eventually become less polarised, enabling us to differentiate, categorise, and subordinate information gained from experience. When early trauma interrupts these processes, the spontaneous psychic play is restricted. With such restriction comes a disruption in body relations and object relations.

Q&A
Somatic Defenses

Somatic defenses isolate a person from whomever they are near. When a patient functions in a pseudo-object relations manner, the symbolic order is challenged. Words are about words and are not symbolic. Confusion can arise, for example, when the analyst makes an interpretation and the analysand focuses on the sound of the voice, the rhythm and tone, the volume and alliteration of sounds. The words become stripped of meaning and unrelated to emotional experience. Confusion and miscommunication can then arise when each member of the dyad assumes the other is using words in the same manner they are. How can we bring meaning to the words, create a three dimensional connection where fusion is no longer necessary for safety.

Q&A
End

Judy Eekhoff

Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA is an IPA certified training and supervising psychoanalyst and a licensed child psychologist.  She is a full faculty member of Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and Seattle Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.  She has a private practice in Seattle, Washington, USA where she teaches, writes, and consults. She is the author of numerous papers and book chapters as well as two books: Trauma and Primitive Mental States: An Object Relations Perspective and Bion and Primitive Mental States: Trauma and the Symbiotic Link. Dr. Eekhoff is on the editorial board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

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