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Feb 26, 2011, 12:32 PM
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Member Since: Feb 2007
Location: The place where X marks the spot.
Posts: 1,848
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The following article excerpts also address the issue of trauma and psychosis...
Quotes from Judith Herman's book: Trauma and Recovery
Quote:
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. When the truth is fully recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often, secrecy prevails and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.
We need to understand the past in order to reclaim the present and the future. An understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovery of the past.
The fundamental stages of recovery are:
1. Establishing safety
2. Reconstructing the traumatic story
3. Restoring the connection between the survivor and his/her community.
Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary symptoms of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.
Certain experiences increase the likelihood of harm.
1. Being taken by surprise
2. Being trapped
3. Being at the point of exhaustion
4. Being physically violated or injured
5. Being exposed to physical violence
6. Witnessing grotesque deaths
Trauma occurs when action is of no avail--when neither resistance nor escape is possible. The traumatized individual may experience intense emotion but without clear memory of the event--or may remember everything in detail but without emotion. Traumatic symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of their own. (Dissociation)
Source: Trauma and Recovery
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More...
Quote:
Psychotic reactions should be seen as attempts to make sense of one's experience and to cope with experiences so difficult that it has not been possible to construct a rational spoken narrative about them. In subsequent stress situation, these experiences may be actualized and a way is found to utter them in the form of a metaphor (Karon, 1999; Penn, 1998; Van der Kolk, 1995). This is the prenarrative quality of psychotic experience (Holma & Aaltonen, 1997; Ricoeur, 1992).
Source: Open dialogues with good and poor outcomes for psychotic crises: Examples from families with violence
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Carl Jung's approach...
Quote:
Jung saw the individual as being made up of many selves, which are autonomous and therefore we cannot assume the unity of consciousness or the primacy of will. Jung relates complexes and psychosis, with a view of the latter as a type of waking dream:
Quote “A person with a strong complex thinks in terms of the complex, he dreams with open eyes and no longer adapts psychologically to the environment” (Jung 1907).
“...in schizophrenia the complexes have become disconnected and autonomous fragments, which either do not reintegrate back to the psychic totality, or, in the case of a remission, are unexpectedly joined together again as if nothing happened” (1939).
Source: A Jungian Approach to Psychosis
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