Introduction
The problem of mental traumatization in childhood has been one of the most relevant for many decades; its study is due to the demands of psychological theory and practice, since human life includes many biological and psychological traumatic experiences. The very process of coming into this world often becomes a physical and emotional trauma.
Difficult life situations accompany the child in the most seemingly happy time of their life – childhood. These can be physical abuse, separation, and loss of significant persons, loss of normal function due to illness and injury, mental coldness, and emotional rejection by parents. Representatives of various theoretical orientations point to the pathogenic influence of mental trauma on the further development of the child’s personality and psyche. However, despite all its importance and relevance, the problem of mental trauma in childhood still does not have sufficient theoretical and research grounds.
Theoretical Basis for the Concept of Trauma
An analysis of the literature revealed that the most complete study of this problem was carried out within the framework of the psychoanalytic approach. S. Freud took the term “trauma” from medicine, literally translated from Greek, meaning “wound,” “injury,” or “result of violence” (Maksimov, 2022). When psychoanalysis was just taking shape, the theory of trauma was Freud’s only leading theory explaining the cause of neuroses (Maksimov, 2022).
Initially, Freud believed that the cause of childhood trauma was sexual harassment, which was reported to him by their first patients (Jones et al., 2019). He believed that the seductions of adults hurt children so much that the children’s “I” could not endure their spiritual consequences, let alone process them (Maksimov, 2022). Unpleasant, painful experiences are repressed, while the effects associated with them continue to develop and lead to attempts to end the unbearable torment and, as a result, to neurotic disorders.
The triggering mechanism of neurosis is external trauma and the internal psychological shock accompanying it. Later, the founder of psychoanalysis concluded that his patients represented fantasies as actual situations; that is, fantasies can be as traumatic as events that occurred in life. Rejecting the theory of trauma, Freud replaced it with the theory of instincts, the central position of which was a two-stage approach to human sexuality (Maksimov, 2022). Contrary to the prevailing notion that the formation of sexuality begins with puberty, Freud believed that by the age of six, a child has already completed its first sexual development (Jones et al., 2019).
This process is slow, labile, and prone to disturbances and internal conflicts, accompanied by infantile traumas. Traumas have a tremendous effect on a child’s ego, as they are of a sexual nature (Jones et al., 2019). However, these repressions are never entirely successful because they break through sooner or later and are expressed in symptoms or neurotic reactions. Therefore, according to the author, neuroses in adults are substitute surrogates for unsatisfied childhood sexuality.
Freud’s teachings influenced the development of new approaches to studying psychic trauma. The idea of trauma fixation, which was studied by his students S. Ferenczi and G. Simmel, has become a key moment in the modern interpretation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Dimitrijević et al., 2018). Traumatization is the process of the impact of a traumatic event on a child. It is always associated with a threat to life when the child feels helpless and abandoned to the mercy of a difficult life situation (Garland, 2018). At the same time, all the methods of coping known to the child do not work, and all their models of interpretation about the world and human relations are insufficient.
Traumatic Factors
There are attempts to trace the relationship between the personality characteristics of an adult and the characteristics of their formation and development at the stages preceding adulthood. The overwhelming majority of psychological concepts on which practicing psychologists are based emphasize the influence of childhood experience on the formation of an adult’s personality, emotional state, attitudes, values, and behavior (Saracho, 2021). The task of practicing psychologists is to identify the conditions and factors that impede the achievement of peaks in personality development. Unresolved childhood trauma may be one such factor.
There is always an emotional response from the individual to trauma. The reaction to a traumatic event may not occur immediately, but after several years or even decades. According to DSM-IV, a traumatic event involves death, the threat of death, severe injury, or some other threat to physical integrity (DSM IV PTSD, n.d.). Moreover, this event may affect a person directly or indirectly through relevant persons. However, sometimes trauma also occurs because a person becomes a witness to a danger threatening someone, injury, or death of a completely alien person.
Trauma is thus a specific class of critical life-changing events. They have the following characteristics: psycho-traumatic events are undesirable; they have a negative impact; they are hard to control. In childhood, a few events and phenomena can be controlled by a child himself; he is entirely dependent on external circumstances and the behavior of surrounding adults. Thus, the child is at risk for the occurrence and experience of psychodramatic events. He becomes vulnerable to traumatic experiences and cannot either healthily prevent them or survive and work through them.
The Impact of Childhood Trauma on Personality Formation
The psychological traumas of childhood that have not been worked out in time have a complex effect on a person. The influence also extends to the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains (Shvaleva et al., 2018). In addition, there are psychosomatic reactions to childhood traumas that were not appropriately addressed. Among the thousands of childhood memories, memory reliably preserves the unfinished psychological traumas of childhood (Shvaleva et al., 2018). Traumatic events are a tool that subsequently guides the rest of life and form a particular personality type; they are the foundation of an adult’s personality.
The emotional reactions of many children who have experienced traumatic events bear traces of the trauma experienced – from isolation to rage, and extreme psychological pain, including anxiety, aggression, despair, helplessness, fear, loneliness, depression, vulnerability, and others (Shvaleva et al., 2018). Due to the variety of manifestations of the consequences of mental trauma in children, one of the first tasks facing specialists is diagnosis.
The child’s psyche has defense mechanisms that allow the memory of trauma to be repressed. In this case, the child may not remember the most traumatic event but only experience intense feelings that suddenly flood over them. These feelings can cause panic attacks, irrationality, unreasonable fear, and depression. The more significant the trauma, the stronger the child’s psyche represses the memory of it.
The mechanism of repression is that the memory itself is separated from the feelings accompanying the trauma. Unpleasant feelings that accompany a traumatic situation most often penetrate consciousness in a dream in the form of nightmares (Shvaleva et al., 2018). That may be facilitated by something reminiscent of the trauma: someone’s voice, appearance, or behavior is the same as that of the person involved in the traumatic event (Garland, 2018). The provocation of unusual reactions can occur when the child gets into an environment that reminds them of painful feelings.
Child Trauma Therapy
As a rule, specialists in helping institutions do not have a common understanding of the signs of psychological trauma. Their judgments about the mental state of the child are based mainly on the following:
- certain observable features of behavior: the quality of contact, relationships;
- assessment of the child’s condition: depression, anxiety, tension, psychosomatic reactions, and more;
- based on the child’s appearance: traces of beatings and physical injuries (Herrenkohl et al., 2019).
The consequences of psychological trauma are a violation of the development of children and their social adaptation, as well as the construction of such a system of values in the child’s personality, which forms life scenarios (Garland, 2018). Often, the behavior of such children is characterized by hyper-aggression, irascibility, vindictiveness, increased attention to detail, emotional callousness, and even stupidity, which in later life often leads to the risk of involving the child in criminal activity.
At the same time, the position of a ‘victim’ can form in children (Garland, 2018). It causes a feeling that they are not like everyone else and need special attention and support, which they require from any person, regardless of whether they want it or not, whether he is capable of it. Having become an adult, the ‘person-victim’ does not try to achieve complex goals or solve problems common to any other person (Garland, 2018). Respectively, they cannot succeed in their professional career to become a full-fledged member of society.
An essential part of working with traumatized children is to teach adults to help them. The main functions of the helping adult as attachment figures are to provide protection to the child and to modulate anxiety. The need for protective attachment figures persists throughout a person’s life (Bartlett & Smith, 2019). It is encouraging that modern theoretical research proves that after experiencing trauma, it is possible to restore reliable attachment and trust relationships under conditions of external security (Bartlett & Smith, 2019).
Positive attachment experiences can be acquired throughout life. The most critical factor in the attachment system is love, meeting people worthy of love and who give it (Bartlett & Smith, 2019). The quality of the relationship with the traumatized child depends on the ability and sensitivity of the caring adult to establish sympathetic contact with the child’s feelings and the ability to resonate. In this case, traumatized children feel understood and ‘seen’ by adults.
Conclusion
Thus, classical psychoanalysis and the concepts of its modern development present psychic trauma as an affective, painful experience experienced by a person in childhood, often associated with relationships with significant adults and the frustration of vital needs. Early trauma may not become an emotional experience for a young child, but later begins to manifest itself in associated situations and determines the functioning of their personality in adulthood. In this regard, an adult can sometimes operate with the child’s cognitive schemes, formed as a reaction to a psycho trauma.
A person who experienced childhood trauma and did not address it promptly cannot have their specific symptoms clearly separated or identified; these symptoms are conditional, and each person experiences traumatic events in their own way. In the course of therapy, the psycho-traumatic events of the past are studied, ways of emotional response to events in the past and present, and cognitive attitudes formed at the time of the event are analyzed. At the same time, the main way to treat childhood trauma is to create a safe environment for the child, support, and a positive attitude.
References
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Dimitrijević, A., Cassullo, G., & Frankel, J. (2018). Ferenczi’s influence on contemporary psychoanalytic traditions. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
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Herrenkohl, T. I., Hong, S., & Verbrugge, B. (2019). Trauma‐informed programs based in schools: Linking concepts to practices and assessing the evidence. American Journal of Community Psychology, 64(3–4), 373–388. Web.
Jones, E., Trilling, L., & Marcus, S. (2019). The Life and Work of sigmund freud. Basic Books.
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