eiseEducation

In 1990 Dr Valerie Sinason had a paper published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, “Passionate lethal attachments” concerned by the lack of progress of three children seen in three different settings, an EBD School (school for children with emotional and behavioural disturbance), a Day Unit for disturbed excluded children and an outpatient Clinic, Dr Sinason noted a particularly destructive constellation in both their inner and outer worlds when the child is left far more at the mercy of internal attachments which can be lethal. Where a child has a severe intellectual disability, it can be even harder to extricate themselves from a destructive relationship. Thirty three years later, after further understanding of the significance of disorganised and lethal attachment patterns, and more long-term work with adults with dissociative identity disorder, Dr Sinason developed the ideas into “Dying for Love; an attachment problem with some perpetrator introjects” (2017) which was published in the Journal of  Trauma and Dissociation, Vol 18, (3).

In trying to understand the problem with the children Dr Sinason found profound answers in Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Nancy recognises her lethal attachment to the violent Bill Sykes as a consequence of her earlier attachment to Fagin. She knows it. `I am drawn back to him, through every suffering and ill usage; and should be, I believe, if I knew that I was to die by his hand'. Rose knows that is madness but can do nothing to help. At another point she says to her would-be rescuers `I am chained to my old life. I loathe and hate it now but I cannot leave it. I must have gone too far to turn back'. In this webinar,  Dr Sinason will discuss the nature and impact of a disorganised attachment pattern that is in fact infanticidal (Kahr 2007) and the issues this poses for therapy.