Catherine Lewis

By Catherine Athanasiadou-Lewis

Psychological trauma is central to the practice of all psychological therapies and is possibly one of the most frequently uttered terms in the history of psychology since its philosophical inception by the Ancient Greeks. Despite the abundance of scholarship devoted to the study and conceptualization of trauma, it remains a perplexing phenomenon given that the majority of contemporary studies focus on post-traumatic symptomatology and allied diagnostic pathology. While the psychopathology of post-traumatic ramifications has been thoroughly examined, the pathopsychology of trauma remains an arena of ongoing exploration and debate. The purpose of the current chapter is to offer an overview of the most predominant conceptual frameworks of psychological trauma residing in the psychodynamic school of thought, which not only addresses the intrapsychic and interpersonal origins of traumatic pathology but also provides a normative framework of healthy human development. Alongside that, a clinical case vignette will be presented to illustrate the interventions, processes, and outcome of psychodynamic treatment for complex trauma. Positioned within a post-modernist paradigm, the chapter aims to review current psychodynamic literature from a perspective that supports the notion that reality can be interpreted in multiple ways and thus embraces the diversity of multiple analytical contributions to the study of trauma.

Part of the book: Psychological Trauma