Marilyn Charles, "Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis" (American Psychological Association, 2025)

About this episode

Marilyn Charles discusses her book on trauma and identity in psychoanalysis, emphasizing the importance of understanding historical context in client issues.

Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis (American Psychological Association, 2025) intricately weaves psychoanalytic and developmental theory to explain how we become who we are, and how we might grow beyond the places we get stuck.In recent decades psychological research and practice has focused heavily on cognitive domains, with far less attention paid to the nonverbal systems through which people register essential meanings. This has led many clinicians to seek disembodied and often mechanistic solutions to clients’ problems. But these approaches fail to recognize hidden sources of trauma, which can be difficult to access through conscious reflection. As the source of a trauma recedes further into the past and remains unexplored and unmourned, the effect can become a lingering adversity that masquerades as destiny―and this worldview can even be passed along through subsequent generations.In this volume, Marilyn Charles argues for a more embodied, less mechanistic view of human development. To understand a client’s problem at a particular moment in time, we must understand the history that has given rise to it, some of which the client may be able to tell us…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Marilyn Charles

Topics covered

• trauma
• psychoanalysis
• identity
• human development
• nonverbal systems

Keywords

• trauma
• psychoanalysis
• identity
• developmental theory
• nonverbal communication

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: American Psychological Association

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