TRAUMA AND DEVELOPMENT:

CLINICAL CONSIDERATIONS  

Date: Saturday, April, 11th 2026 10am-2pm
Credits: 4 CE 
Speaker: Marilyn Charles PhD, ABPP

Meeting is both on Zoom & in-person at: 
The Center for Integrative Counseling & Psychology
4305 MacArthur Ave. 
Dallas, TX 75209

Current times pull towards simplistic solutions to the complex problems that ail us.  Increasingly, however, we see that most psychological (and much somatic) distress can be traced to parental failures to attend to the child’s needs, the type of small-t, complex trauma that impedes growth.  These failures invite overwhelming experiences of helplessness, precursors for the later feelings of shame, humiliation and alienation that can be seen at the core of the current upsurge in narcissism.  

Narcissism has become a catch-all phrase, referring to an almost sociopathic lack of care.  The psychoanalytic literature, however, helps distinguish between individuals who lead with their vulnerability and those who lead with their grandiosity.  Whether the presentation is libidinal or aggressive, narcissistically-organized individuals pose particular problems in the treatment because of their difficulty in tolerating or even imagining an actual relationship with a separate person because of the threat to their own subjectivity.  Such persons tend to be out of touch with embodied feelings, resulting in obsessive defenses that do not easily relieve, even with intensive psychoanalytic treatment.  In contrast, those we would term borderline tend to suffer from an over-saturation of feelings that impedes the development of reflective capacities.    

Clinical illustrations will highlight some of the complexities of working with individuals whose development has been waylaid by the trauma of insufficient parental attunement, focusing, in particular, on ways in which an over-reliance on thinking versus feelings invites different technical choices in the treatment.  (238).

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. To describe how a distinction between the narcissistic and the borderline positions can help guide treatment.

2. To describe one link between character difficulties and early parental failures.

3. To describe why Winnicott’s (1971) ideas of the use of the object can be important to have in mind when working with character difficulties.

4. To describe one distinction between vulnerable and aggressive narcissism.

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHY:

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center, Co-Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) and Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.  Affiliations include the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, Universidad de Monterrey, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and Harvard Medical School. Research interests include creativity, metacognition, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the impact of devaluation on women and other marginalized groups.  A contributing editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and a member of several editorial boards, Marilyn is actively engaged in mentoring future generations of psychoanalytic scholars, clinicians, and researchers.  Marilyn is also a mother and grandmother, and an artist and a poet, aspects of self that inform her practice, writing, and mentoring.  She has presented her work nationally and internationally, publishing more than 150 articles and book chapters and six books: Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience; Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor; Learning from Experience: a Guidebook for Clinicians; Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan; Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live; and, most recently, Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis. She has also published five edited volumes: Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin); Women and Psychosis and Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown); and The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Psychoanalytic, Attachment, and Developmental Perspectives (with Jill Bellinson). (243).

REFERENCES:

Charles, M (2025). Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis. Washington, DC: APA Press.

Kealy, D., Laverdière, O., Cox, D. W. & Hewitt, P. L. (2023). Childhood emotional neglect and depressive and anxiety symptoms among mental health outpatients: The mediating roles of narcissistic vulnerability and shame. Journal of Mental Health, 32(1):24-32.

Neal, D. W., Bufford, R. K., Charles, M., & Thurston, N. (2023).  Metacognitive Changes in Individuals with Severe Mental Disorders in Response to Psychoanalytic Therapy. JASPER, 5(1):5-40.

Sirois, F. (2012). The role and importance of interpretation in the talking cure. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 93:1377-1402.