Trauma or phantasy

Abstract

This chapter examines complex trauma and dissociation through a neuropsychoanalytic perspective that integrates psychoanalytic theory, attachment research, and contemporary neuroscience within a predictive processing framework. Beginning with the classical psychoanalytic view of trauma as a breach in the system’s capacity for binding, the chapter examines dissociation as the consequence of experiences that cannot be integrated into episodic memory or a coherent narrative and reframes this process in predictive terms as a failure to bind overwhelming prediction errors through perception or action. These ideas are then linked to disorganized attachment and to relational strategies that emerge as attempts to restore homeostasis when the caregiver is experienced as both the indispensable source of safety and the source of threat, neglect, or helplessness. The chapter also examines evidence that early maltreatment can shape brain development in ways that alter sensory systems and large-scale networks involved in self-experience, including the default mode network, suggesting how early relational environments may become embedded in both subjective experience and neural architecture across development.