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Course Description

This course explores the relationships among attachment and trauma, and approaches trauma as a developmental crucible, including the developmental impact of early trauma.  A primary focus will be current neurobiological models of trauma and its progressive effects across the lifespan. Special topics will include splitting, dissociation, and introjection as well as psychodynamic outcomes of trauma. 

Curricular Notes

Biological grounding and developmental realism

AION 204 consolidates the developmental and relational insights of AION 201–203 by grounding them in neurobiological process, preparing participants for advanced work with trauma, dissociation, and personality integration. It marks the point in the curriculum where psychodynamic formulation and neuroscience are explicitly braided, without collapsing one into the other. By addressing splitting, dissociation, and introjection as adaptive survival strategies with neurobiological correlates, the course prevents both biological reductionism and purely symbolic abstraction. This course grounds psychodynamic thinking in embodied developmental process, preparing clinicians for advanced work with trauma, dissociation, and personality integration.

Open Evaluation
1. Describe contemporary neurobiological models of trauma and explain how early attachment disruptions and traumatic stress shape brain development, affect regulation, and stress-response systems across the lifespan.
2. Analyze trauma as a developmental crucible by differentiating the psychological and neurobiological sequelae of early, chronic, and acute trauma, and relating these patterns to attachment organization and character structure.
3. Differentiate key psychodynamic trauma responses—including splitting, dissociation, and introjection—and formulate how these processes function as adaptive survival strategies that later constrain psychological integration.
4. Apply an integrated neurobiological and psychodynamic framework to clinical material in order to tailor therapeutic stance, pacing, and interpretive depth when working with trauma-impacted patients across levels of personality organization.