Terror in Psychotherapy: The New Zealand Lectures

Contemporary neuroscience, infant research, and relational psychotherapy make clear that we are a relational species—that our brain and neurological systems actually organize in the first year of life depending on the relationships that are and are not available. By the second year of life a symbiotic interaction, characterized by mutual affect regulation and mutual attachment experiences, is becoming established. In Terror in Psychotherapy, Dr. Lawrence Hedges demonstrates how trauma experienced during these “organizing” and “symbiotic” levels of relational development stimulate fear, anxiety, and terror that have consequences for later relationships—in extreme forms laying the foundation for suicide and homicide. A series of case vignettes illustrate how early relational intrusive trauma produce terror in transference and countertransference experiencing.