Relational trauma and its impact on late-adopted children

This paper describes work with two children, placed for late adoption who have suffered relational trauma. The paper explores the long-term consequences of such trauma, which includes problems with affect regulation, difficulties in generalising from one experience to another and shifts between phantasies of omnipotent control and sudden helplessness. Using drawings from one boy's therapy, it is argued that many children adopted at a later age live in two worlds, both internal and external, and internal objects and memories from the past vie with new experiences and representations for ascendancy within the child's mind. Which is more real: the world of the past or the present? The paper describes how these children experienced sudden and troubling shifts in focus as they were catapulted from feeling states belonging to one world to the other. The paper ends with a consideration of how findings from neuroscience may help us to understand these sudden shifts and overall argues for a pulling together of psychoanalytic thinking and child development research findings to support the child in psychotherapy

Affects and Cognition in a Social Theory of Unconscious Processes

The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Group Analysis, Vol 38 / Issue 1, 2005, Copyright The Group-Analytic Society , by SAGE Publications Ltd at : http://gaq.sagepub.com/This paper argues that affects and cognition cannot be separated in human consciousness and that human consciousness is fundamentally a social phenomenon. This contention is based on a number of arguments. First, research into brain functioning indicates that those centres of the brain that deal with emotion also deal with the capacity to select rational and moral actions. Second, is the argument that attachment and separation behaviours, that is, social acts, are essential for the human body’s capacity to regulate itself. Next, the paper reviews G. H. Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism, according to which human consciousness and self consciousness arise in social acts so that the individual is social through and through. The notion of “the” unconscious is then explored. It is argued that this is a fundamentally individualistic notion of what is unconscious in human action and as such is incompatible with the contention that human consciousness is a social process. Suggestions are made for thinking of what is unconscious in terms of social processes. The paper concludes with a section on how one might think abut disturbance and pathology from the perspective of complex responsive processes.Peer reviewe