Developmental trauma is a more theoretically-driven construct, which refers to a potentially traumatic configuration of the relational field between the child and his or her caregivers, characterized by a lack of emotional reciprocity and a disavowal of the child’s affective needs (Bromberg, 2013). In developmental trauma, the child’s affective needs are disowned and entirely subdued by parental demands, desires, conflicts, fears and projections (Borgogno, 2007). Whether developmental trauma does or does not include overt material neglect and abuse of the child, it always embraces a series of negative child-caregiver interactions such as emotional neglect, intense role-reversal, or parental behaviors directed at the psychological domination of the child (Schimmenti, 2012). This definition of developmental trauma partially overlaps with other psychoanalytic constructs related to childhood trauma such as “cumulative trauma” (Khan, 1963) or “strain trauma” (Kris, 1955). These constructs highlight the accumulation of frustrating tendencies that derive from a longstanding external noxious force (especially a disturbance in the mother’s role as a protective shield), which constantly pressures the child to maintain defenses against overwhelming anxiety and that becomes in itself traumatic. However, our way of conceiving developmental trauma is more in line with Ferenczi’s (1929) understanding of the unwelcome child and Shengold’s (1989) concept of soul murder, where particular attention is given to the dysfunctional affective climate in which the child grows up and its polarization of the parent’s rather than the child’s needs. In fact, the focus here is on parental disavowal and denial of parts of the child’s existence, in particular those parts which go beyond the parental urges, wishes, and projections. In other words, it is as if the parents do not recognize a psychological existence of the child (Schimmenti, 2013), and thus they may be impersonal and affectionless in caregiving (Winnicott, 1971); or they may use the child as an “evacuatory object”, i.e. as a garbage can of their disturbed mental states (Shengold, 1989); or they may even violently introduce mental content into the child that can satisfy at a conscious or unconscious level their own needs, to the detriment of the child’s natural development...As Shengold (1989, p. 24) elegantly stated, “our identity depends initially on good parental care and good parental caring—on the transmitted feeling that it is good to be here”, while the intimate affective climate of developmental trauma may represent the exact opposite condition, such as “it is no good that you are here; you are only a problem” (Schimmenti, 2012, p. 198)

Adriano Schimmenti

Vincenzo Caretti

Notably, developmental trauma has important biological correlates. For instance, child abuse and neglect can slow down the myelination of the prefrontal medial cortex (PFMC), which is implicated in executive functioning and in regulating peripheral response to stress (De Bellis, 2005). Without the mitigating effects of the PFMC, the amygdala is left on its own to evaluate the potential threat and, if sensitised to negative emotional stimuli, it will most likely produce a signal activating the fear system (Panksepp, 1998). At that point, the child’s adrenal gland releases cortisol, a corticosteroid hormone, that stimulates gluconeogenesis-activating anti-stress pathways in the body. However, excessive exposure to cortisol can damage the cells in the hippocampus, which is responsible for converting short-term memories of emotional events into long-term memories, thus impairing the creation of new memories and inhibiting memory retrieval of already stored information (Joseph, 1999). This is consistent with psychobiological perspectives suggesting that dissociation may arise from a brain-based regulatory response to fear or other extreme emotion (e.g. Lanius et al., 2010), and it is possible that this biological process initiates one of the most important developmental pathways leading to the most severe forms of dissociation, particularly among those patients suffering from dissociative amnesia, depersonalization and even dissociative identity disorder: the implicit, emotional memories of relational threatening stimuli can be stored at a sensory level, but no episodic memory related to the traumatic event and its circumstances seem to be retrievable (Nadel & Jacobs, 1998). In this case, it is possible that the brain produces automatic, state-dependent responses reflecting what was once experienced—internally and/or externally— at a sensory and bodily level or, on the contrary, it replicates (i.e, it dissociatively reenacts) the same self-regulation strategy originally used to face the perceived threat. In fact, developmental research has shown that children can remember early events across short delays, but after long delays these memories may no longer be consciously accessible (Cordón et al., 2004; Terr, 1988). Research has also demonstrated that under certain

LINKING THE OVERWHELMING WITH THE UNBEARABLE

circumstances early memories of trauma can be retrieved (Cordón et al., 2004), and this may particularly apply to children (Gaensbauer, 1995, 2000); nonetheless, these memories may have a dream-like quality, since the effects of psychobiological dysregulation can prevent the rehearsal of such memories, leading to the decay of trauma-related details (Fivush & Schwarzmueller, 1995). This suggests that the mechanisms involved in the dialectic between compartmentalization and detachment are developmentally complex and are likely related to a difficulty in integrating the emotions into a cohesive structure of meaning when a child goes through self-experiences that rapidly shift from one side to another. The difficulty for severely abused and neglected children in selecting an integrated response system with consistent affect regulation strategies can also be inferred from the Strange Situation Procedure (Ainsworth et al., 1978). The Strange Situation is an experimental procedure for assessing attachment styles in children between the ages of 9 and 24 months. As the caregiver and a stranger enter and leave the room, the researchers observe the child’s reactions in terms of the amount of exploration the child engages in throughout the experiment: the interaction with the stranger, and the responses to the departure and return of the caregiver. Main and Salomon (1986) identified a group of children, highly represented among those who have suffered neglect and abuse, who exhibited a disoriented/disorganized attachment (the “type D” attachment style) and whose behaviors phenotypically resembled dissociative states (Main & Morgan, 1996). Some of these children showed extreme detachment symptoms, similar to animal responses of freezing (i.e. paralysis responses) when faced with an inescapable shock (Nijenhuis et al., 1998), perhaps because the parent represented for them a threat-associated stimulus, automatically eliciting the “feigned death” or other similar response. However, there are other disorganized children who show different patterns of behavior that rapidly shift from one to another. For example, a child can appear paralyzed looking at the wall, after which he turns his head back looking frightened at his caregiver, and immediately after he closes his eyes and starts violently moving his head back-and-forth. Another child can appear in a feigned death state in the arms of her caregiver, when she suddenly arches her back unnaturally and throws herself backward. Levine (1997) noted that animals emerging from freezing often manifest repetitive, almost seizure-like motor activity, postulating that these stereotyped motor responses serve to allow the completion of the motor sequences of successful escape or defense strategies. Consequently, Van der Hart and colleagues (2005) have postulated that the behaviors of disorganized children during the Strange Situation include concurrent or successive activation of the attachment action system and the defense action system.

Adriano Schimmenti  Vincenzo Caretti

Soul, or psychic, murder involves trauma imposed from the world outside the mind that is so overwhelming that the mental apparatus is flooded with feeling. The same overstimulated state can result as a reaction to great deprivation. The terrifying too-muchness requires massive and mind-distorting defensive operations for the child to continue to think and feel and live. The child’s sense of identity (that is, the emotional maintenance of the mental images of his or her self) is threatened.

SHENGOLD