Repeating and recalling preverbal memories through play: the psychoanalysis of a six-year-old boy who suffered trauma as an infant.

This paper explores the impact of trauma on the later development of a 6-year-old boy. The trauma disturbed his development and psychic functioning in almost every area, including his attainment of object constancy, capacity to regulate affects and tolerate frustration, his sense of self and self-protective functioning, as well as his capacity to symbolize. Three phases can be distinguished in his analysis based on his capacity to deal with memories of his traumatic past: initially attempting to forget but expressing them through persistent increased arousal and re-enactment behavior followed by recalling and re-enacting salient incidences, and finally, remembering and playing through early memories in displacement. Each phase was characterized by an increasing level of affect regulation, symbolic play, and capacity to tolerate and think about the unbearable. The paper explores the different ways in which chronic trauma and the salient traumatic event, experienced in infancy are repeated, recalled, and expressed verbally and through behavior.