This book focuses on the recognition and psychoanalytic treatment of a debilitating form of early relational trauma poignantly described by Steven Stern as airless world syndrome.
This book focuses on the recognition and psychoanalytic treatment of a debilitating form of early relational trauma poignantly described by Steven Stern as airless world syndrome.
A patient can be said to be living in an airless world when one or both parents have failed to recognize, or worse, actively negated their childs subjective experience and needs, instead imposing their subjective reality on the child such that the child had no choice but to adopt the parents reality as their own. When a childs mind is captured in this waywhat Stern calls identification with negationthe result is an unconscious bondage to the internalized negating other which can be disabling to the senses of self, personal agency, and realness. With extended clinical examples in every chapter, Stern brings the reader into the depths of each patients airless world and the co-created needed relationship that ultimately, fitfully transforms it.
Written in a detailed yet accessible style, this book is invaluable to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.
1. Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequelae of Identification with
Parental Negation.
2. Airless Worlds, Needed Relationships, and Complex
Selfobjects
3. Breathing Together: Complex Selfobjects and Therapeutic
Action.
4. Airless Worlds and Couples Therapy.
5. Analytic Adoption of the
Psychically Homeless.
6. On Management: The Art of Relating to Difficult
Parents and Other Family-of-Origin Members.
Steven Stern, Psy.D., is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and The Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (NYC). He practices in Portland, ME.
