Dialectics and Developmental Trauma: How Toxic Introjects Affect Attachment

Abstract

Psychic reality is dialectically mediated. Just as individual psychology is prefaced on social ontology, we can never elude the fact that we participate in greater parameters of being that dialectically constitute our psyworld. In this essay, I will outline an adumbrated theory of psychoanalytic dialectics as it is applied to psychosocial processes with a particular emphasis on how attachment and trauma condition the subject’s being in the world. Here I am particularly interested in advancing the thesis that attachment pathology is largely organized on borderline levels of functioning that derive from toxic introjects and disorganized self-states resulting from developmental trauma. Attachment pathology results in deficit unconscious organizational processes within self-structure and predisposes patients toward developing disorders of the self with many overdetermined, polysymptomatic profiles. Thinking dialectically about the interdependency between attachment, trauma, and character structure has direct bearing on our clinical work and understanding society as a whole.