Airless Worlds and the Restoration of Psychic Breathing

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 childs 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 childs mind is captured in this waywhat Stern calls identification with negationthe 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 patients airless world and the co-created needed relationship that ultimately, fitfully transforms it. With rich clinical vignettes and in a detailed yet accessible style, this book is invaluable to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.