Trauma, Guilt and Reparation The Path from Impasse to Development

Trauma, Guilt and Reparation identifies the emotional barriers faced by people who have experienced severe trauma, as well as the emergence of reparative processes which pave the way from impasse to development.

The book explores the issue of trauma with particular reference to issues of reparation and guilt. Referencing the original work of Klein and others, it examines how feelings of persistent guilt work to foil attempts at reparation, locking trauma deep within the psyche. It provides a theoretical understanding of the interplay between feelings of neediness with those of fear, wrath, shame and guilt, and offers a route for patients to experience the mourning and forgiveness necessary to come to terms with their own trauma. The book includes a Foreword by John Steiner.

Illustrated by clinical examples throughout, it is written by an author whose empathy and experience make him an expert in the field. The book will be of great interest to psychotherapists, social workers and any professional working with traumatized individuals.

Foreword by John Steiner

Preface

Chapter One: Trauma, guilt and reparation: A psychoanalytic paradigm

Chapter Two: Impediments to reparation: Resentment, shame and wrath – the significance of the gaze

Chapter Three: Repetition compulsion and the primitive super-ego: Attempts at reparation in borderline patients

Chapter Four: The 'Tower': Submission and illusory security in a traumatic defence organisation

Chapter Five: Trauma, reparation and the limits of reparation

Chapter Six: Traumatic remembering and ecliptic forgetting: on the riddle of time in Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days

Chapter Seven: Reparation and gratitude

Bibliography

Heinz Weiss, M.D., is the Head of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the Robert Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart. He is also the head of the Medical Division and member of the directorate of the Sigmund-Freud-Institute, Frankfurt/Main, and Chair of the Education Section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.