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Cognitive-affective, defensive, and neurobiological aspects of victim-victimizer relational dynamics are illustrated. Observations of a 26-year-old mother and her 9-year-old son during a semistructured play task and protective and objective assessment data provide the sources of inference regarding how the parent and child's thematic structures are relationally expressed, maintain their psychopathology, and foster a victim-victimizer interactional cycle. By way of complementary interpersonal, psychological, and neurobiological processes, a victim-victimizer relational dynamic is maintained and intergenerationally transmitted. (Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 68[3], 197-212)
The victim-victimizer relationship is a dialectical process that is maintained by cognitive, affective, and neurobiological aspects of the dyadic relationship (Twemlow, 1995). In a parent and child, this dysfunctional object relationship is a factor that contributes to the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment (e.g., Green, 1998) and that plays an important role in understanding the etiology and expression of borderline disorders (e.g., Kernberg, 1994; van der Kolk, Hostetler, Herren, & Fisler, 1994).
Dysfunctional relationships are rarely conceptualized themselves as disorders, with the exceptions of the Relationship Disorders in the infant nosological system (i.e., Diagnostic Classification: 0-3, Zero to Three, 1994) or several disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR; 2000) such as Reactive Attachment Disorder of Infancy of Early Childhood or the Relational Problem "V" codes. The DSM system construes disorders as occurring in an individual, although the manual offers multiple examples of how disorders are expressed within relationships (Sroufe, Duggal, Weinfield, & Carlson, 2000).
In this article, we conceptualize the victim-victimizer relationship as a disorder and examine how the relationship is maintained and expressed in the individual psychopathology of both participants. Demographic and objective test data on a mother and her 9-year-old son are presented, as well as several of the child's responses from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1943). Next, a videotape of the parent and child is described as they complete a semistructured play task, the Parent-Child Interaction Assessment-II (PCIA-II; Holigrocki, Kaminski, & Frieswyk, 2002). The case highlights the relational disorder and how the parent-child interactions assist in drawing inferences regarding the representations and defenses of both participants as well as their individual psychopathologies.
Method
Data were collected in a midwestern city as part of a larger study on the relationship between children's...