Recent trends and adaptations in trauma-informed psychoanalytic psychotherapies: A scoping review.

Abstract

A growing sensitivity has emerged within psychoanalytic theory and intervention to the specific conditions of complex posttraumatic pathology and its clinical challenges. Yet an articulated, encompassing view of the diverse proposals within this new sensitivity is still lacking. This article advances such articulation through a scoping review of psychoanalytic interventions focused on trauma and dissociation published over the past 15 years. Our analysis identifies five axes of trauma-sensitive psychoanalytic practice addressing vulnerability to dysregulation, limited symbolic access to traumatic material, structural dissociation, vulnerability to disorganization in contexts of intimacy, and enactments arising around dissociative collusions and dilemmas of recognition within the therapeutic dyad. Overall, the reviewed literature relocates interpretation within a temporally and clinically responsive framework, in which the timing and form of interpretive interventions are calibrated to the traumatized patient's regulatory, dissociative, and symbolic capacities. We conclude by outlining essential aspects of the therapeutic stance implied by these contributions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).