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Introduction
This paper is predicated on two significant gifts from ancient Aboriginal peoples: the concept of The Dreaming, and the most ancient form of treating trauma, known by modern Aboriginal people as 'healing circle' and traditionally as Dadirri, among other names. In the ancient concept of The Dreaming, we humans imbued our external world and events with meaning from our internal world; we created boundaries for this meaning; we created symbols for it. Central to this paper is an attempt to understand the way meaning is stripped away as a result of trauma and how something approaching psychotic states results from it.
Ancient Aboriginal culture healed trauma through Dadirri, a ritualised form of 'deep listening', not an ordinary witnessing but an empathic psychic action, now known to the modern world as psychotherapy. I want to try to show how the Aboriginal people have been cut off from access to aspects of their culture that might have helped them to accommodate and recover from traumatic aspects of current culture. To do so, the essay draws on my experience in an organisation called 'Gunawirra' (the invisible seed of all creation in Aboriginal mythology). We are a group of twenty professionals who support Aboriginal mothers and infants from pregnancy through to 5 years of age, and who work in thirty Aboriginal preschool centres throughout New South Wales and two special centres in Sydney. After fourteen years of working with young Aboriginal mothers and their infants, we have dared to hope that our psychoanalytic approach may offer a new way to repair the losses in their lives. Indeed, our Aboriginal workers observe our profession of psychoanalytic therapy as symbolising in much the same way as The Dreaming. In order to explore these issues, however, I would first like to introduce some ideas about trauma born out of our collective work.
Breakdown in Trauma
I am proposing in this paper that 'autistic cut-out' is a normal primitive defence that works to protect the person from over-stimulation. In extreme cases, such as trauma in early infancy or childhood, or severe adult trauma, if the defence becomes concretised, a psychotic 'pocket' or core or internal mind-state may result. Emotion is unable to be experienced, pain is unable to be suffered, meaning...