Being safe and being brave: new thoughts on trauma, and adaptations to technique

This paper outlines ways in which more traditional psychoanalytic technique has been challenged by new findings about trauma and the optimal ways in which it can be worked with. In particular it outlines how therapists need to become much more knowledgeable about the risks of retriggering PTSD symptoms, and about dissociative symptomatology. In addition, in some cases it is suggested that psychoanalytic therapists might become braver in helping victims of trauma to feel anger about what happened to them, and that often for optimal recovery anger and rage needs to precede remorse, reparation and a bearing of depressive anxieties