Trauma and Primitive Mental States: An Object Relations Perspective
ISBN: 9780429431401
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Mental Health; Clinical Social Work; Trauma Studies; Psychoanalysis; Psychotherapy;

Trauma and Primitive Mental States: An Object Relations Perspective offers a clinically based framework through which adult survivors of early childhood trauma can re-engage with painful past events to create meaningful futures for themselves.

The book highlights the use of the body and the mind in working with these early unmentalized and unrepresented states, illustrating the value of finding language that embodies emotions, and working in the here and now of transference and counter-transference. Including a range of examples of how early trauma can thus be re-presented and clinically understood, the book illustrates how patients can discover themselves and leave their repetitive patterns of suffering behind.

Written by a clinician with over 30 years' experience, this will be fascinating reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as any mental health professional working with childhood trauma.


Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA is an IPA certified training and supervising psychoanalyst and a licensed child psychologist. Eekhoff is a full member and past president of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and a full faculty member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society & Institute in Seattle, WA, USA. She has a private practice in Seattle, Washington, USA.

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