The impact of a war experience on the Inner world of a young child

摘要

The author uses material from the treatment of a young child whose development became seriously arrested from the time of a traumatic experience during a war. This experience, combined with the impact of the birth of a younger sibling while he was still a baby himself, had catastrophic consequences. He could only communicate his feelings of terror and fear of dying through the use of projective identification. The persecutory anxiety of this child was such that for a while he could not tolerate hearing the interpretations, and was prone to violent outbursts.