Unassimilated Happenings Pierre Janet

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Unassimilated Happenings(Pierre Janet)

• By Ivor Browne

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Self-Organisation
Water
H2O
Emergence
H
O2
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Systems Causality
Reductionist
WHOLE
PART
Systemic
WHOLE
PART
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Living Systems Definition
OPEN SYSTEM

• Contains a number of elements
• Dynamic process
• Boundary - regulates what goes in and out
• Maintains and renews itself
• Locus of control within itself (self-organising)
• Reproduces itself

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Key Criteria of a Living System

• Pattern of Organisation
• The configuration of relationships that
  determines the
• systems essential characteristics
• Structure
• The physical embodiment of the systems pattern
  of organisation
• Life Process
• The activity involved in the continual
  embodiment of the
• systems pattern of organisation

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Two Types of Systems
Living Auto-Poeisis (Self-making)
Non-Living Allo-Poeisis (Other making))
(Maturana and Varela) Chilian Biologists
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History of Traumatic Neurosis

• From ancient times the adverse emotional effects
  of trauma have been recognised by philosophers
  and writers
• In 1859 Briquet suggested Hysterical symptoms
  came as a result of traumatic events.
• He first formulated the concept of dissociation
  (desaggregation).
• Charcot (1825-1893) first related the symptoms of
  dissociation to brain changes following a
  traumatic event

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History of Traumatic Neurosis (cont.)

• Dr. Jacob Da Costa (1871) described a group
  American Civil War veterans who were physically
  sound but complained of palpitations, cardiac
  pain, tachycardia, headache, dimness of vision,
  and giddiness. He labeled the condition
  irritable heart. This became known as Da
  Costas syndrome.
• After World War One, Sir Thomas Lewis (1919)
  referred to a similar syndrome as soldiers
  heart, Openheimer called it neurocirculatory
  asthenia.

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Unexperienced Experience

• When something happens we do not fully experience
  it as it happens
• The integration of experience is a process,
  taking place over time, involving
  neurophysiologic and somatic work
• Why has this simple fact of everyday experience
  been overlooked?

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There Appear to be Two Main Reasons

• 1. We repeatedly find descriptions of how
  traumatic experiences are re-lived,
  re-experienced, or re-enacted. The
  fundamental error here is the use of the prefix
  Re and the description of unresolved traumatic
  experience as repressed memory.
• 2. Certain historical factors surrounding the
  early work of Sigmund Freud, for it was he, who
  first clearly drew attention to the whole issue
  of traumatic neurosis.

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Fight or Flight

• Walter Cannon (1928) A living creature faced
  with a threat to its physical integrity responds
  to the challenge with a fight or flight
  response.
• Homeostasis(Cannon) when the threat has been
  dealt with in one way or the other, the
  physiology returns to its more or less steady
  state.
• Cannon failed to emphasize an equally ancient
  strategy for survival seen in many species.

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Freeze Response

• Where fight or flight are not possible an
  organism has the capacity, when faced with an
  overwhelming threat, to freeze or play dead.
• This involves an immediate, primitive biological,
  adaptive response acting at the level of the
  primitive brain, outside of conscious awareness
  or control.
• E.g. The cat and the mouse the spider, when you
  touch it with your finger, curls into ball and
  plays dead. Other animals, such as the hedgehog,
  for which this form of inhibition is their only
  means of defense.

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Freeze Response (cont.)

• With traumatic events several factors combine to
  determine whether the initial shock and
  freezing which occurs is maintained
  indefinitely.
• Where there is alcoholism, marital conflict, or
  simply a family with little trust, warmth or
  security and the open expression of emotion is
  discouraged, then freezing is likely to
  supervene. Obviously worse, of course, is the
  situation where physical or sexual abuse, etc. is
  occurring within the family itself, being
  perpetrated by a father or near relative.

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Freeze Response (cont.)

• The freezing of an experience can take several
  forms, from a complete blocking of the entire
  experience, in both its cognitive and emotional
  aspects, to a partial suspension of the event.
• The latter response is seen where, after a first
  rush of emotion, there is a complete inhibition
  of all feeling, but not of action. This leaves
  the person free to take whatever measures are
  necessary for survival. But, short of actual
  survival, it is also an essential device to
  enable individuals to deal with the practical
  problems which arise following a tragedy.

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The Frozen Present

• In humans this defense is now used as a way of
  avoiding internal destabilisation.
• The potentially disintegrative effect of the
  external threat is signalled by the initial surge
  of emotion.
• Our biological structure seems to be able to
  specify in advance that to fully experience the
  threatening encounter would destroy or
  disintegrate our core organisation.
• The capacity to suspend the integration of the
  experience appears to involve the Medial Temporal
  Lobe.

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The Frozen Present

• When an event takes place we may not fully
  experience it as it happens. We do take an
  impression of the raw experience, otherwise it
  would no longer exist within us.
• But integration fails to progress beyond this
  point. This is why such experiences, if
  activated years later, are experienced as
  happening now.

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Declarative Memory

• Most research into memory has been an attempt to
  understand the various forms of dementia. This
  memory processing system involves the hyppocampus
  and related areas of the primitive brain.
• What is missing from this research is whether we
  have the capacity, when subjected to an
  overwhelming traumatic experience, to block this
  memory processing system.

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The Amygdala.

• The amygdala are not a component of the medial
  temporal lobe memory system. They are important
  for other functions concerning conditioned fear
  and the attachment of affect to neural stimuli.
  They also have a role in making associations
  among sensory modalities.
• In identifying these emotional connections of the
  amygdala we are perhaps getting closer to the
  site for the blocking mechanism which occurs when
  one is faced with an overwhelming trauma.

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Traumatic Experience

• Traumatic experiences can be of many kinds
  including the following
• Life threatening - birth, near death, drowning,
  etc.
• Loss - key relationship, pet, job, self-esteem,
  suicide, etc.
• Physical trauma - accident, operation, illness.
• Cruelty - physical, sexual abuse, torture, etc.
• Family conflict, alcoholism, drug abuse,
  gambling, etc.

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Traumatic Experience (cont.)

• How traumatic an event is depends not only on the
  seriousness of the event, but also on the
  internal state of the person at that time.
• The traumatic experience therefore is the
  summation of the external event and all the
  learned past of that person, including previous
  insults or experiences of a similar kind which
  were frozen and not integrated.

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Traumatic Experience (cont.)

• It is now as if the trauma is within the person
  but not part of them.
• This internalised stressor now exists, outside
  of time, in a potentially unstable state.
• The person retains these subsidiaries in an
  inchoate form, some of which may be represented
  somatically as well as centrally. One may be
  unable therefore to consciously identify the
  threatening experience, it is as if it had never
  happened.

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Traumatic Experience (cont.)

• If activated later by some life event, the
  experience breaks through and causes flashbacks,
  nightmares, etc. This triggers painful emotional
  responses, which the individual once again tries
  to suspend, but now only partially successfully.
• This then gives rise to the full-blown syndrome
  of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

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Freud and Janet

• Freud and Janet were contemporaries. Freud
  (1826) was three years older, but Janet (1829),
  who died in 1947, outlived him by almost 8 years.
• Although they never met they were aware of each
  others work. In a letter to Fliess freud stated
  Our work on hysteria has at last received
  proper recognition from Janet in Paris.
• Janet Praised the work of Breuer and Freud
• We are glad to find that several authors,
  particularly M.M.
• Breuer and Freud have recently verified our
  interpretation,
• already somewhat old, of subconscious fixed
  ideas with
• hystericals.

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Freud in Paris

• Freud went to Paris from October 1885 until
  February 1886 to study under Charcot, the great
  French neurologist. In 1914 Freud wrote
• Influenced by Charcots use of the traumatic
  origin of hysteria, one was readily inclined to
  accept as true and etiologically significant the
  statements made by patients in which they ascribe
  their symptoms to passive sexual experience in
  the first years of childhood, to put it bluntly,
  to seduction.

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Freud and Breuer

• Back in Vienna Freud joined forces with Joseph
  Breuer to work on the traumatic origin of the
  neuroses.
• In The Aetiology of Hysteria Freud stated
• We must take our start from Joseph Breuers
  momentous discovery the symptoms of hysteria.
  are determined by certain experiences of the
  patient which have operated in a traumatic
  fashion
• They further stated
• Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences

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Freud and Breuer

• They stated that these memories were
• Found to be astonishingly intact and to
  possess remarkable
• sensory force and when they returned, they
  acted with all the effective strength of new
  experience.
• They stressed the importance of the affective
  component
• We found to our great surprise that each
  individuals hysterical symptom immediately and
  permanently disappeared when we
• had succeeded in bringing to light the memory
  of the event by
• which it was provoked and in arousing its
  accompanying affectRecollection without affect
  almost invariably produces no result.

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Seduction Theory

• Freuds other great contribution (and why he
  parted company with Breuer) was to stress the
  importance of sexual abuse in early childhood,
  in the genesis of hysteria.
• Unfortunately he went too far
• what ever case and whatever symptom we take as
  our
• point of departure, in the end we infallibly
  come to the field
• of sexual experience.

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Hoist with his own Petard

• In The Aetiology of Hysteria Freud stated
• If you submit my assertion that the aetiology
  of hysteria lies in sexual life to the strictest
  examination, you will find thatin some 18 cases
  of hysteria I have been able to discover this
  connection in every single symptom, and where
  circumstances allowed, to confirm it by
  therapeutic success.

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Seduction Theory (cont.)

• In the French journal Review Neurologique
  (March 1986) Freud said
• In none of these cases was an event of the
  kind found above (seduction in childhood)
  missing. It was represented either by a brutal
  assault committed by an adult or by a seduction
  less rapid and less repulsive but reaching the
  same conclusion.

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From Fact to Fantasy

• In little more than a year Freud underwent a
  complete change of heart. Earnest Jones in his
  biography of Freud described what happened
• Up to the spring of 1897 Freud still held
  firmly to his
• conviction of the reality of child traumasAt
  that time
• doubts began to creep inThe great secret of
  something,
• which in the last few months has gradually
  dawned on me.
• It was the awful truth that most - not all - of
  the seductions in childhood which his patients
  had revealed and on which he had
• built his whole theory of hysteria, never
  occurred.

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The Assault on Truth

• Jeffrey Masson in his book The Assault on
  Truth(1985) described the circumstances
  surrounding Freuds abandonment of the Seduction
  Theory.
• Masson was working as project director of the
  Freud Archives and was to be appointed as full
  director by Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler, but
  because he published the hidden correspondence
  from Freud to Fleiss he was quickly dismissed for
  letting the cat out of the bag.

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Abandonment of the Seduction Theory

• In April 1896 Freud presented his paper The
  Aetiology of Hysteria to the Society for
  Psychology and Neurology in Vienna and he
  described to Fleiss what happened
• A lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the
  Psychiatric Society
• met with an icy reception from the asses, and
  from Kraft-Ebbing
• the strange comment it sounds like a
  scientific fairytale and this after one has
  demonstrated to them the solution to a more than
  a thousand year old problem, a source of the
  Nile.
• A month later, on the 4th May he wrote
• I am as isolated as you could wish me to be,
  and a
• void is forming around me.

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The Debacle of Emma Eckstein

• Fleiss believed the nose was an alternate sexual
  organ. Operate on the nose and you would cure
  hysteria.
• Fleiss came to Vienna (Feb. 1895) and operated on
  Emma. The operation was not a success, he left
  soon afterwards.
• She developed a purulent discharge. Freud called
  in another surgeon. He pulled out a yard of
  gauze, a flood of blood came and she almost bled
  to death.

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Emma Eckstein (cont.)

• She suffered a relapsing course with recurrent
  bleeding for several months.
• On 16 April 1896 Freud told Fleiss
• A completely surprising explanation of
  Ecksteins
• haemorrhages which will give you much pleasure
• you were right, that her episodes of bleeding
  were hysterical
• On 4 May
• when she saw how affected I was by her first
  haemorrhage
• she experienced this as an old wish to be
  loved in her illness
• she became restless during the night because
  of an unconscious wish to entice me to go there
  and since I did not come during the night she
  renewed the bleeding as an unfailing means of
  rearousing my affection.

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Fact to Fantasy

• So, in one masterly stroke, a botched operation
  was changed from fact to fantasy bleeding out of
  her longing for Freud himself.
• Thus he found a way to rehabilitate himself in
  the eyes of his medical colleagues, so that he, a
  Jew, could once again find himself accepted in
  conservative catholic Vienna, and be able to earn
  a living.
• While in Paris Freud used to go down to the
  morgue and he would have been familiar with the
  issue of sexual assaults on children which was
  under active discussion at that time.

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Ambroise Auguste Tardieu

• He was professor of legal medicine at University
  of Paris. His Etude medico Legale (1857) drew
  attention, for the first time, to the frequency
  of sexual assaults on children. In France during
  1858 to 1869, there were 9,125 persons accused of
  rape or attempted rape of children, most aged
  between 4 and 12, almost all of them were girls.
• Tardieu did not doubt the authenticity of these
  sexual assaults on children.

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Alfred Fournier P.C. Brouardel

• Within 30 years his two successors took a starkly
  different view. Articles by
• 1) Fournier Simulation of sexual attacks on
  young children (1880)
• 2) Brouardel The Causes of Error in Expert
  Opinion with Respect to Sexual Assaults(1883).

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Brouardel

• Hysteria plays a considerable role in the
  genesis of these false accusations, either
  because of the genital hallucinations which stem
  from the great neurosis or because hysterics do
  not hesitate to invent mendacious stories with
  the sole purpose of attracting attention to
  themselves and to make themselves interesting.

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Fact to Fantasy (cont.)

• In The History of the Psychoanalytic
  Movement (1914) Freud explained
• When this ideology broke down under the weight
  of its
• own improbability and contradiction in
  definitely ascertainable circumstances, the
  result at first was helpless bewilderment
• .if hysterical subjects trace back their
  symptoms to traumas
• that are fictitious, then the new fact which
  emerges is precisely that they create such
  scenes in fantasy This reflection was soon
  followed by the discovery that these fantasies
  were intended to cover up the auto-erotic
  activity in the first years of childhoodand
  now, from behind the fantasies, the whole range
  of a childs sexual life came to light.

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Fact to Fantasy

• This new insight opened the way to turn painful
  reality into fantasy and to blur the distinction
  between them. Out of this came the whole
  development of classical psychoanalysis.
• Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general have
  remained in a state of confusion because of this
  up to the present day. Thus awareness of the
  frequency, and serious implications, of sexual
  abuse was delayed for nearly a hundred years.

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Pierre Janet

• The widespread popularity of psychoanalysis
  virtually eclipsed the work of Pierre Janet so
  that, when he died in 1947, his death was hardly
  reported in the media.
• Nevertheless, the emphasis he placed on
  traumatic antecedents, dissociation, and the
  retraction of the field of consciousness,
  offered a model of psychological trauma which
  remains valid today.

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Psychological Healing

• In the above work, under a sub-heading -
  Unassimilated Happenings, he described the
  effects of psychological trauma as follows
• All the patients seem to have had the
  evolution of their
• lives checked they are attached upon an
  obstacle that
• they cannot get beyond. The happening we
  describe as
• traumatic has been brought about by a situation
  to which
• the individual ought to reactwhat
  characterises these
• attached patients is that they have not
  succeeded in
• liquidating the difficult situationStrictly
  speaking then,
• one who retains a fixed idea of a happening
  cannot be
• said to have a memory of the happening. It
  is only for
• convenience that we speak of it as a traumatic
  memory.

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Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

• In DSM4 the distinction between acute, chronic
  and delayed onset PTSD is now accepted.
• In their list of symptoms no distinction is made
  as to the different times when these occur.
• In fact a long period, often of many years, may
  elapse following the trauma, before the emergence
  of the acute symptoms of PTSD.
• During this latent phase they may show few
  symptoms, only a constricted life pattern, with
  recurrent episodes of depression. Most had been
  attending psychiatrists with a diagnosis of
  clinical depression.

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False Memory Syndrome

• For generations the abuse of women and children
  of both sexes, both physical and sexual, carried
  out primarily by men, was a dark secret.
• It was only through the courage of a few
  pediatricians, the feminist movement, and one or
  two psychiatrists, which finally, over the past
  30 or 40 years, brought this abuse , and the
  extent of it, out into the light of day.
• Until then there was a culture of silence which
  meant that victims had no where to turn.

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False Memory Syndrome (cont.)

• Unfortunately, when the wall of silence was
  finally broken, because those who have been
  abused tend to present with a range of symptoms,
  a number of over-enthusiastic therapists and
  counselors saw abuse lurking below the surface,
  where no abuse had actually occurred.
• They actively suggested this to clients using
  peer pressure, regression techniques,
  fundamentalist therapeutic groups, etc., and
  highly suggestible subjects complied with the
  production of pseudo memories.
• Thus innocent parents and others were wrongly
  accused, and the wheel turned full circle,
  giving rise to organised groups of parents and
  others attempting to protect themselves from
  false accusations.

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The Repression Debate

• A number of studies have shown that both children
  and adults can and do distort past memories.
• If subjected to suggestive influence they can
  invent occurrences which have never happened, or
  which happened to someone else.

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The Repression Debate (Contd).

• It was Bartlett who said as far back as 1932
• Some widely held views have to be completely
  discarded
• and none more completely than that which treats
  recall as
• the re-excitement in some way of fixed and
  changeless traces(remembering) is an
  imaginative reconstruction or construction built
  out of the relation of our attitude towards a
  whole mass of organised past reactions or
  experience.

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The Repression Debate (Contd).

• Psychologist Endel Tulving has also described
  this misconception
• One of the most widely held, but wrong,
  beliefs, that
• people have about memory, is that memories
  exist,
• somewhere in the brain, like books exist in a
  library, or
• packages of soap on the supermarket shelves,
  and
• that memory is equivalent to somehow retrieving
  them.
• The whole concept of repression is built on
  this misconception.

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Repression

• The usual explanation of what is happening is
  summed up in Freuds own words in 1924 when he
  wrote
• The theory of repression is the corner stone
• of our understanding of the neurosis.

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Repression Continued

• It is now clear that when a long-term memory is
  retrieved, it is reassembled from a number of
  inputs, from various times in the past, and
  therefore is essentially a new creation.
• Hence, if what we are dealing with here is simply
  repressed memory, it will be quite impossible
  to distinguish between a true recollection and a
  fantasy.
• This is the argument put forward in questioning
  the reliability of traumatic experiences
  retrieved by means of experiential methods.

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Repression Continued

• This argument, however, conceals a crucial
  misunderstanding of the nature of unresolved
  traumatic experience.
• For these experiences are not long-term memories,
  nor indeed memories in the accepted sense at
  all, but the suspended frozen present.
• These are experiences which have not yet been
  integrated into memory, and therefore have yet
  to be experienced.

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Retrospective Study

• We reviewed 180 cases and they broke down as
  follows
• True - 110
• FMS - 6
• Unclear - 53
• Dropped out -
• ------------------
• Total - 180

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Activation

• Activation may occur due to another trauma of a
  similar kind e.g. a person who was sexually
  abused as a child may in adult life be raped.
• But the Activation need not be a further
  serious traumatic episode. It can be something
  as simple as the first night in the marriage bed,
  or watching a TV programe about sexual abuse.
  This for most people may be entirely normal.
• But because this touched the sensitive frozen
  experience, for this person, the effect may be
  catastrophic and unleash full-blown PTSD.

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Activation Continued

• The Activation of Frozen experience explains
  why so many cases of traumatic neurosis only
  present for treatment in adult life.
• Once Activation has taken place the individual
  is now in a dysfunctional state. They are unable
  to maintain the freeze so as to be able to
  cope, but, on the other hand, they are unable to
  fully experience and integrate the blocked
  trauma of many years earlier.

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Dissociation

• When a person is subjected to the same traumatic
  experience again, and again. e.g.. Where there is
  incestuous abuse within the family.
• In such cases the child is face with an
  impossible situation. Dissociation is then
  likely to supervene with a splitting of the
  personality.
• In this way the two dimensions of the personality
  continue to learn and develop quite separately -
  one visible and available to consciousness, the
  other hidden and only likely to appear when
  activated.

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Multiple Personality

• Such Dissociation is very common in Traumatic
  neurosis.
• Very rarely this may spontaneously give rise to
  multiple personality - historically there are a
  few recorded examples of this.
• There is ample evidence however that the majority
  of the latter are iatrogenic i.e. the result of
  active suggestion by enthusiastic therapists who
  believe this to be a common clinical reality.

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D.S.M.

• It was only in the closing years of the 20th
  century that the realisation that trauma could
  lead to enduring consequences was finally
  accepted.
• The essential symptoms of what is now recognised
  as P.T.S.D were described by Kardiner as far back
  as the Second World War, Which he termed a
  Physioneurosis. Yet it was only as a result of
  the Viet-Nam War and the publication of D.S.M. 3,
  that P.T.S.D. was finally enshrined in an
  official psychiatric classification.
• Erich Lindemann(1944) Symptomatology and
  Management of Acute Grief.

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Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

• (As described in D.S.M. IV)
• (A) The person has been exposed to a traumatic
  event in which both of the following were
  present
• (1) the person experienced, witnessed, or was
  confronted with an event or events that involved
  actual or threatened death, or serious injury, or
  a threat to the physical integrity of self or
  others.
• (2) the persons response involved intense fear,
  helplessness, or horror. In children this may be
  expressedby disorganised or agitated behaviour.

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P.T.S.D. (cont.)

• (B) The traumatic event is persistently (re-)
  experienced in one or more of the following ways
• (1) recurrent and intrusive distressing
  recollections of the event, including images,
  thoughts, or perceptions.
• (2) recurrent distressing dreams of the event.
• (3) acting or feeling as if the traumatic event
  were recurring (illusions, hallucinations, and
  dissociative flashback episodes,including those
  that occur on awaking or when intoxicated.

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P.T.S.D. (cont.)

• (4) intense psychological distress at exposure
  to internal or external cues that symbolise or
  resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.
• (5) physiological reactivity on exposure to
  internal or external cues that symbolise or
  resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.

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P.T.S.D. (cont.)

• (C) Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated
  with the trauma and numbing of general
  responsiveness, as indicated by three or (or
  more) of the following
• efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings or
  conversations associated with the trauma.
• (2) efforts to avoid activities, places, or
  people that arouse recollections of the trauma.
• (3) inability to recall an important aspect of
  the trauma.

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P.T.S.D. (cont.)

• (4) markedly diminished interest or
  participation in significant activities.
• (5) feeling of detachment or estrangement from
  others.
• (6) restricted range of affect (e.g. unable to
  have loving feelings.)
• (7) sense of foreshortened future (e.g. does not
  expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a
  normal life span.

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P.T.S.D. (cont.)

• (D). Persistent symptoms of increased arousal
  (not present before the trauma), as indicated by
  two (or more) of the following
• (1) difficulty in falling or staying asleep
• (2) irritability or outbursts of anger
• (3) difficulty concentrating.
• (4) hypervigilance
• (5) exaggerated startle response

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The Family - A Living System

• The family is a living system with its own
  separate life and existence.
• Where there is a block in the clients family we
  typically find there is not only a secret , but
  also a myth.
• The myth is that if these things were ever spoken
  of, somebody would break down or be destroyed.

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The Family Myth

• The thing to do then is bring the family together
  face to face with the client.
• It is obviously most satisfactory when the truth
  can be brought out and accepted by all.
• If they refuse to be involved, they can still be
  faced openly with the truth, or one can even
  write an account of it and send it to them.
• If there is denial by the family the client may
  become the guardian of the secret.

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Reappraisal

• Persons who have been traumatised or abused over
  many years will typically, have a strongly
  negative self-image.
• They may have self-destructive tendencies, either
  to mutilate themselves or attempt suicide.
• When they come for therapy major areas of their
  personality may be dissociated.
• They dont know why they have all these negative
  feelings about themselves.

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Reappraisal Continued

• As the experiential phase nears completion they
  are able to take responsibility for their
  dissociated aspects and to integrate these.
• Then a reappraisal of their situation becomes
  possible.
• They can then dis-confirm their previous
  anticipation that things will always be the same.
  
• Thus reappraisal is essentially a cognitive
  phase.

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Revictimisation

• The strange finding that many patients suffering
  from Post Traumatic Stress seem to be stuck
  as if there were a theme running through their
  life.
• They continue to be subjected to the same kind of
  traumatic experience, over and over again. (e.g.
  where there has been sexual abuse early in
  childhood, one finds the person being abused by
  others in adolescence and then perhaps subjected
  to rape or other kinds of sexual abuse again and
  again in adult life).

74
Revictimisation Continued

• In these instances it is as if the individual
  lives out a theme, which the external world
  continually plays back to them.
• This phenomenon is usually explained as
  arising from early personality formation, which
  then tends to attract the same kind of traumatic
  insult later, and evokes a reciprocal response in
  those who carry a complimentary tendency. ( e.g.
  the daughters of alcoholics who in adult life are
  attracted by, and attractive to, alcoholics whom
  they often end up marrying. A similar situation
  of mutuality has been noted in battered wives who
  attract those who will brutalise them.)

75
Revictimisation Continued

• This undoubtedly represents part of the
  explanation. However, in a sizeable minority of
  patients, one finds traumatic incidents
  happening, which could conceivably be due to
  coincidence, but, when these occur over and over
  again, the odds against their happening by chance
  are unconvincing. It was this phenomenon which
  Carl Jung, in his tentative way, adverted to in
  his essays on Synchronicity. . He commented on
  the way the external world seemed to match the
  internal preoccupation of the person concerned.

76
Transpersonal Experience

• The ancient yogic philosophy of Karma points to
  another possible explanation of these strange
  repetitive interactions. Stanislav Grof calls
  these obscure linkages co-ex systems and points
  out that the theme usually extends into the
  transpersonal area. He cites those who have
  experiences which are not from their present
  life, but have all the immediacy and vividness of
  real experiences. I too have frequently found
  the subject spontaneously going into an
  experience, which is not from their present life,
  but which they experience as an episode from a
  former lifetime.

77
Transpersonal Experience (cont.)

• I have often found that it is only when the
  person has fully experienced one or more of these
  transpersonal episodes they are able to take a
  new direction in life.
• They are then no longer subjected to the same
  kind of traumatic insult again and again.

78
END

• Thank you Ladies Gentlemen