The early trauma and its daimonic aspects

This paper explores some of the daimonic elements of unconscious mentation that emerge both in dreams ant in the transference/countertransference field with early-trauma patients and illustrates these with an extended clinical exemple. An archaic and typical (archetypal) “trauma complex” is articulated (with diagram) as a bipolar structure consisting of divine child protected and/or persecuted by an inner “guardian angel”. Sources of this structure and is mythological inner objects are traced to trauma at the stage of what Winnicott calls “unintegration” ant to flooding by disintegration anxiety at a time before nascent ego-structure has formed. In an extended case exemple, the author shows how the patients’ traumatized innocence and desire for a new start, thwarted by self-attacking defences, pulls him into playing the inflated role of her guardian angel, leading to retraumatization in the transference. Working through is seen as the necessary disillusionment and humanization of these daimonic structures as they are projected, suffered, and transmuted by the analytic partners in the stormy process of psychotherapy.