Falling backwards

by Doris Brothers

Brothers is most concerned with the realm of trust that serves as the "glue" of self-experience, a realm she calls self-trust - the hope or wishful expectation of obtaining and providing the selfobject experiences necessary for psychological well-being. Mature self-trust comes from repeated childhood experiences of "falling backwards" and being caught by reliable adults. Straddling the conscious world of subjective reality and the unconscious world of selfobject fantasies, self-trust acts as a psychic adhesive for one's sense of self. Betrayal of self-trust shatters selfobject fantasies and results in the dissociative alteration of subjective reality associated with traumas. Brothers asserts that such betrayals are found at the heart of all disorders of self-experience. This perspective sheds fresh light on many familiar psychoanalytic concepts. For example, the Freudian notion of a repetition compulsion is reinterpreted in terms of efforts to rescript trauma scenarios which lead to tr