Traumatic Roots Research Articles

The Weight of the Paternal: Authorship and Gustave Flaubert’s Legacy in Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the metanarrative aspect of Elena Ferrante’s La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2019, The Lying Life of Adults 2020) as it relates to the legacy of fathers and at least one literary father, Gustave Flaubert as the author of Madame Bovary. The paternal in Ferrante’s novels is not an aspect that critical literature normally takes into consideration, given the themes in her work. However, an analysis of Ferrante’s appropriations of the language of great male literary figures will demonstrate that language enhances an understanding of her work’s feminist aspect. To unravel Ferrante’s self-reflexive literary discourse, I take into consideration three aspects outlined in the opening of the novel: 1) the traumatic experience with which the story begins; 2) the programmatic and fictionalized separation of the authorial aspect of storytelling from the narrating voice and the narrated experience; and 3) the significance of Naples’ ‘fixed’ spaces. These aspects channel Ferrante’s discourse about an authorial coming-of-age that sees the writer successfully re-elaborating the traumatic experience she identifies as her first reckoning with herself as a reader and writer: the reading of Madame Bovary. The traumatic roots of this metanarrative discourse can be found in Frantumaglia.

Chinese music therapy to treat depression in children and adolescents: The BARIT-Model

Depression is broadly considered a global epidemic. In China it ranks among the most prevalent mental disorders and is seriously affecting the younger generation (prevalence between 4% and 41%), hence the necessity to foster health education and sustainable resilience. Meta-synthetic construction resulted in a music-based model of educational therapy comprising five principles, beauty, activation, responsiveness, immersion and transformation, hence the name ‘BARIT-model’: (i) referring to anthropological, psychological and neuroscientific aesthetics, the approach benefits from the healing power of aesthetic experience, (ii) behavioural activation is widely regarded as an efficient approach to treat depression. Different from conventional cognitive behavioural therapy, the BARIT-model involves artistic activities such as music improvisation, sound scene improvisation, vocal experiments or creative variations of Chinese martial arts, (iii) responsiveness concerns the qualitative similarity of emotion and music, alongside the patients’ feeling of being ‘understood’ by what they are listening to, (iv) while depressive mood tends to occupy the whole person, music immersion can help to escape that ‘pathological cage’, (v) finally, traumatic roots of depression need therapeutic processing, such as artistic symbolisation, intermodal transformation and relabelling of traumata as potential source of creative performance. The BARIT-model is part of a comprehensive project to improve mental health in Chinese children and adolescents through arts-based methods for classroom education, which encompasses ‒ in addition to depression ‒ attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, oppositional defiant disorders, anxiety disorders, stress-related disorders and burnout syndromes, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or binge eating, as well as disorders related to the COVID-19 pandemic, e.g. developmental syndromes caused by lockdown and social distancing.

Brachial plexus traumatic root injury in adults: Role of different non contrast MRI sequences in pre-operative assessment

Aim of the workTo evaluate the role of fast imaging employing steady-state acquisition (FIESTA) together with conventional MRI and MR myelography (MRM) sequences in evaluation of brachial plexus traumatic roots injury in adults in correlation with surgical outcome. Subjects and methodsThis prospective study included 20 patients (their mean age was 22.6 years). All patients came with initial clinical diagnosis of traumatic brachial plexus and positive electrodiagnostic tests. All underwent conventional MRI, FIESTA and MRM and the imaging findings were correlated with surgical outcome. ResultsCombined evaluation of the conventional MRI, FIESTA and MRM sequences yielded highest diagnostic sensitivity (95%) of pseudomeningocele and non-visualized nerve root detection which are the most important marks of brachial plexus root injury compared to conventional MRI combined with FIESTA (90%) and to conventional MRI combined with myelography (85%) ConclusionIn traumatic brachial plexus root injury, it is vital to differentiate between pre- and postganglionic injuries. Combined conventional MRI/FIESTA/MRM depicted root injury has the highest sensitivity in detection of psuesdomeningiocele and non-visualized nerve root.

Nostalgia or das Heimweh: Homesickness and the Press-ganged Soldier in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863)

AbstractThis article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) uses nostalgia as a literary aesthetic and historical context to articulate a narrative of disorientating epochal change. Gaskell’s novel draws on nostalgia’s roots as a psychosomatic disease afflicting soldiers displaced by international conflicts to reassert the traumatic roots of a familiar feeling often understood as superficial and insignificant. Nostalgia began as a disease brought on by migration and only later came to be thought of as a type of sentimental memory; first home was far away and then it was long ago. Gaskell’s novel incorporates both, mingling longing for a place with longing for a past. This double distancing articulates an experience of transition within her historical novel. She draws on an eighteenth-century trope used by figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, repurposed for the demands of prose fiction. The homesick soldier who was the first sufferer with pathologic...

Toward a Better Understanding of the Relationship between Childhood Trauma and Psychiatric Disorders: Measurement and Impact on Addictive Behaviors.

Toward a Better Understanding of the Relationship between Childhood Trauma and Psychiatric Disorders: Measurement and Impact on Addictive Behaviors.

The Mind in Fragments: The Neuroscientific, Developmental, and Traumatic Roots of Dissociation and Their Implications for Clinical Practice

In this article, I highlight the life-long impact of early relational trauma on a person's psychological and emotional development and its role in creating dissociation. I discuss the differing views in the psychotherapy world over the relative importance of dissociation and repression and explore the historical roots of these differing views in the fundamentally different models of the mind offered by Freud and Jung. I describe the neuroscientific basis for dissociation. I give an account of some clinical work with a dissociative patient and discuss the modifications to psychoanalytic technique that are necessary when working with severely dissociative patients.

The Traumatic Roots of Containment: the Evolution of Bion’s Metapsychology

W. R. Bion wrote repeatedly about his World War I experiences as a tank officer, thus engaging in historicizing a traumatic emotional experience. A close reading of the many layers in these writings suggests that the war experiences influenced the metapsychology he created. The author argues that haunting questions regarding the ability of the mind to survive trauma led Bion to elaborate on the process of containing emotional experience, and hence to address the lack of an intricate theory of thinking in psychoanalytic metapsychology and to offer a vision of a mind struggling to survive, culminating in the growth of a postmodern consciousness.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviews in this article: From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness by Felicity de Zulueta. Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective by Mark Epstein. That Why Child.‐ Problems in Psychotherapy and Counselling by Carol Jeffrey. Equal Partners ‐ Good Friends: Empowering Couples through Therapy by Claire Rabin. Research in Psychoanalysis: Process, Development, Outcome edited by Theodore Shapiro and Robert Emde Armfuls of Time: The Psychological Experience of the Child with a Life‐threatening Illness by Barbara M. Sourkes. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder by Allan Young. H.J. S. Guntrip: A Psychoanalytical Biography by Jeremy Hazell. The Emotional Needs of Young Children and their Families: Using Psychoanalytic Ideas in the Community edited by Judith Trowell and Marion Bower. Multiple Selves, Multiple Voices: Working with Trauma, Violation and Dissociation by Phil Mollon. Race, Culture and Counselling by Colin Lago in collaboration with Joyce Thompson.