I argue that trauma is basically about losing one's ground in the familiar space of

psychic and interpersonal history where one's most defining moments in life have taken

place and where one's distinctive qualities as a person have been formulated in

relationship with significant others or, to use Kohut's term, selfobjects. Not only

catastrophic disasters or violent personal upheavals such as rape or a sudden loss of loved

ones, for example, cause traumatic wounds. But a serious disturbance within, or damage

to, this personalized inner space is traumatic in that it threatens to destroy the carefully

built self-narrative and subjects one to doubt, shame, or uncertainty. Trauma is an

experience of violation and violence that destroys this unique, carefully carved out

personalized space. Once this protective space is violated due to a chronic assault to

one's dignity and autonomy, one loses not only "the belief that one can be oneself in

relation to others" but one "may lose the sense that [one] has any self at all."169

 Dissociation, often diagnosed as the most common representative symptom of

trauma, points to the surreal feeling of disorientation people feel toward themselves and

the world after the fundamental psychological landscape crumbles under their feet. They

are left clueless about how to cope with the hostile forces threatening to annihilate them

at any minute. As a result, disparate sensory data become foregrounded and remain

distinctive without any logical, meaningful connection between them, since overall

psychological background serving as the integrating force of different elements of the self

no longer exists.

 As Doris Brothers, a Kohutian psychoanalyst specializing in treatment of trauma

survivors, argues, in many traumatic incidents, "the psychic adhesive" integrating the self

and selfobject fantasies dissolves, making survivors no longer able to be themselves or