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Airless Worlds and the Restoration of Psychic Breathing: Working Psychoanalytically with Early Relational Trauma
Hardcover
Series: Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book
ISBN13: 9781032955070
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Aug 11 2025
Pages: 150
Weight: 0.91
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
This book focuses on the recognition and psychoanalytic treatment of a debilitating form of early relational trauma poignantly described by Steven Stern as airless world syndrome.
A patient can be said to be living in an airless world when one or both parents have failed to recognize, or worse, actively negated their child's subjective experience and needs, instead imposing their subjective reality on the child such that the child had no choice but to adopt the parents' reality as their own. When a child's mind is captured in this way--what Stern calls identification with negation--the result is an unconscious bondage to the internalized negating other which can be disabling to the senses of self, personal agency, and realness. With extended clinical examples in every chapter, Stern brings the reader into the depths of each patient's airless world and the co-created needed relationship that ultimately, fitfully transforms it.
Written in a detailed yet accessible style, this book is invaluable to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.
1 different editions
Also available
Airless Worlds and the Restoration of Psychic Breathing: Working Psychoanalytically with Early Relational Trauma
Stern, Steven
Paperback
Also from
Stern, Steven
Airless Worlds and the Restoration of Psychic Breathing: Working Psychoanalytically with Early Relational Trauma
Stern, Steven
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