Die verwundbare Analytikerin

The withdrawal of acceptance lies at the centre of the traumatic experience and the disastrous consequences are overwhelming feelings of anxiety and shame relating to the individual’s own existence. Intense feelings in traumatised individuals are accompanied by fundamental shame as they fear once again being inundated by their own emotions and thus yet again becoming helpless and defenceless. Further, the emergence of emotions inevitably demonstrates their roots in the individual personality and it is precisely the withdrawal of recognition as a separate, autonomous being which these individuals have experienced. “When I experience myself as an individual with feelings, then I am but I am not allowed to be” seems to be what these people are unconsciously thinking. Recognition, in the true sense of the word, can only be achieved by the performative act of recognition both of the subjectivity and of the trauma. Such acts of recognition can be performed in the psychoanalytical process when the analyst shows herself as being involuntarily vulnerable and at the same time as a survivor of that vulnerability. This means, however, that the dialectic tension must not only be endured but under certain circumstances also admitted; the tension between the wish to keep all emotions within oneself and the simultaneous unavoidable failure to do so. Only an analyst who is actively alive can, in the last resort, help the traumatised to establish contact with the world of living objects and to feel themselves as being alive.