From absence to presence: Symbolizing early object loss and symbolic failures in psychoanalytic trauma therapy

Abstract In this article, the author explores how the symbolic absence and the failure to internalize a good or transformational object leave a lasting imprint on the psyche and the therapeutic process. Contemporary trauma theory privileges event‐based accounts of trauma and can overlook the intrapsychic experience of absence and its symbolic consequences. Two case studies show how early abandonment can foster persecutory anxiety, dissociation and a persistent inability to symbolize experience or relate to others, leaving patients fixed in paranoid, schizoid functioning. In analysis, real or imagined absences evoke narcissistic withdrawal, annihilation fears and attacks on linking. When the therapist contains these enactments through countertransference awareness and survival, absence can be symbolized. Through such lived moments, a transitional space opens in which the patient gradually develops the capacity to be alone, to think and to use the therapist as a usable object within an evolving analytic space.