Trauma and place identity: the breaking and repairing of place attachment in the mind of an adolescent with developmental trauma

ABSTRACT This paper illustrates features of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a young adolescent who had experienced adverse childhood events, culminating in cumulative trauma. This led to the atrophying of her ‘sense of place’ and ‘place identity’, both integral to the development of a sense of self. The patient’s memory of places seemed to have been pulverised and required the contact and containment of the adult mind of the therapist to find recomposition. A therapeutic relationship developed, thanks to the sharing of objects and places which had become fragmented in the patient’s mind. There was a need for locations, paths, places, indeed entire nations needed to be emotionally recomposed in the transference, to assume rudimentary but thinkable forms. The psychotherapy made it possible to find part of my young patient’s memory through play, and the value of intensive but short-term work became evident. Psychotherapy allowed partial repair of the capacity for place attachment, which facilitated the exploration of the external world, the possibility of attachment to new places, and the construction of new place identities, alongside her developing sense of herself.