The impact of a war experience on the inner world of a young child.

Abstract

The author uses material from the treatment of a young child whose development became seriously arrested from the time of a traumatic experience during a war. This experience, combined with the impact of the birth of a younger sibling while he was still a baby himself, had catastrophic consequences. He could only communicate his feelings of terror and fear of dying through the use of projective identification. The persecutory anxiety of this child was such that for a while he could not tolerate hearing the interpretations, and was prone to violent outbursts. The author describes how she had to bear the projections and manage the physical attacks while trying to maintain the capacity to observe and think clearly. This setting produced an experience of containment that gradually allowed this child to accept and understand interpretations which diminished the power of feelings that had overwhelmed him in the past. Through introjection of the experience of being understood during his sessions, he began to develop the capacity to think about his feelings. This allowed him to gradually recover, develop, and make use of his intelligence and imagination, and the behavioural difficulties that brought him to treatment disappeared.