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This case is discussed in the contexts of affect theory, attachment theory, and dissociative experience. Dissociative adaptations to living that become entrenched resistances during psychotherapeutic inquiry give way to a scrupulous attention to the characteristics of dissociative experiencing. Somatosensory free association and appreciation of experiential aspects of depersonalization, derealization, and dissociative amnesia open new areas of negotiation between patient and therapist.
Paradigms from infant attachment and adult attachment research parsimoniously explicate psychodynamic formulations. "Conflicted interest" and "conflicted disinterest" are proposed to flesh out appreciation of the child's inner experience during Type A and Type C attachment experiences. The Type D attachment style is consistent with a dissociative phenotype. The concept of "isolated subjectivity" can help explain the extent to which individuals both know and don't know about their experience, in the same moment, and without conscious conflict or anxiety.
"While they quickly become attached to strangers, children cling to the parents who mistreat them. " Why would anybody do that: cling to a source of pain, or seek comfort with strangers? "'Run away,' he told me. I couldn't, I was stuck in 'frozen immobility.'" Penelope Hollander1 boldly challenges us to consider the paradox of intensely bound relationship, routinely immersed in pain, but unresponsive to the healing power of time and insight. Her search for self-understanding has freed her from the intensity of intrusions of an "uninvited guest," but not the visits. She believes that this pattern endures because it constitutes "the very essence of the trauma which must be kept alive, paradoxically, by the victim to assure himself/herself that it happened." Is that true? Is there no relief? Ever? How can we hope to understand and heal? Why is this grief stuck? Is there something that holds Ms. Hollander in this painful constellation of contradictory living?
"I always really knew...what happened," writes Ms. Hollander in such a way as to leave the meaning unclear. She is telling us something about recollection and "knowing." Is she just telling us that she "knows" in the way of an "oppressed" person? Does she wish us to understand that while at any moment she might not have "known" what happened between herself and her father, that she also "always really knew what happened?" These positions seem simultaneously contradictory...