The unfinished story of trauma as a paradigm for psychotherapists (a review and some empirical findings on paradigms and prejudices).
Notwithstanding the medical connotation of the term "trauma," (defined as wound, injury), when trauma comes in the wake of organized violence, it is thus a part of complicated inter-actional, cultural and historical phenomena. Two of the currently valid diagnostic and therapeutic paradigms are spelled out in this article, i.e. The first presented is the one of the "unfinished story," of the impact of the primary trauma then and there, and the second presented is one of the post-re-entry "alienation" of the secondary trauma here and now. Shifting the latter to the foreground focuses attention upon the functioning of the therapist rather than on that of the victim. A review of the literature on the behavior of the post-violent society towards its post-traumatic subjects in general, will also be presented. Furthermore, clinicians' attitudes, in particular, suggestive of 5 levels of therapist functioning that could then be discerned in empirical subpopulations of Israeli psychotherapists (N = 34), in relation to the Holocaust trauma, was also examined. We found that their attitudes and reactions were influenced by their own and their parents' past roles in history, their cultural backgrounds, and clinical subculture or setting that they belonged to. The implications of these findings for post-trauma therapy are briefly discussed in this essay.
Dasberg
H
H
Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.
D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D003209:Concentration Camps; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007557:Israel; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D011613:Psychotherapy; D012919:Social Behavior; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000209:etiology / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014858:War Crimes