Behind the closed doors of mentalizing. A commentary on “Another step closer to measuring the ghosts in the nursery: preliminary validation of the Trauma Reflective Functioning Scale”

Abstract

A commentary on Another step closer to measuring the ghosts in the nursery: preliminary validation of the trauma reflective functioning scale by Ensink, K., Berthelot, N., Bernazzani, O., Normandin, L., and Fonagy, P. (2014). Front. Psychol. 5:1471. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01471 In his Clinical Diary, Ferenczi (1932/1988) suggested that an organizing life instinct allows the individual to survive child abuse. He called this instinct Orpha, and described it as a guardian angel who anesthetizes “the consciousness and sensitivity against sensations as they become unbearable” (p. 9). Ferenczi argued that a fragmentation however occurs in personality as a consequence of the abuse: the personality is split into a “capable part” as a “regulated mechanism” dealing with daily life and activities, secret parts that struggle in despair because they experience “the fire of suffering,” and another part containing “this suffering itself as a separate mass of affect, without contents and unconscious, the remains of the actual person” (p. 10). Ferenczi's concept of Orpha tends to correspond to our current understanding of dissociation. In fact, child abuse and neglect (CAN it is also consistent with the current theory of structural dissociation (Van der Hart et al., 2006), which postulates a separation between the apparently normal part and the emotional part of personality in complex post-traumatic stress disorders. Further attention deserves another interesting finding in the study by Ensink and colleagues. After running multiple regression analyses to identify the best predictors of engagement in pregnancy and quality of couple functioning among the women in the sample, these researchers found that RF-T was the only significant predictor in the regression models. However, they only entered RF-T scores, RF-G scores, unresolved vs. non-unresolved attachment, and secure vs. insecure attachment as potential predictors in the regression analyses. They did not control for other variables that were already available in their study and could account for the study findings, namely CAN moreover, it has been proposed that AAI indicators of unresolved trauma reflect the severity of dissociative process resulting from CAN on a research level, RF-T scores should prove to predict maternal attitudes toward pregnancy and couple functioning over and above trauma scores, before attributing such a predominant position to (lack of) mentalization in the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Without any doubt, the research by Elsink and colleagues further supported the validity of the “ghosts in the nursery” construct. However, behind the closed doors of mentalizing, the fire of suffering and the dissociated mass of traumatic affects may continue to howl, unseen and unrecognized, around the child.... Full text and references are available (open access) via the DOI. Language: en