Airless Worlds and the Restoration of Psychic Breathing

This book focuses on the recognition and psychoanalytic treatment of a debilitating form of early relational trauma poignantly described by Steven Stern as airless world syndrome . A patient can be said to be living in an airless world when one or both parents have failed to recognize, or worse, actively negated their child’s subjective experience and needs, instead imposing their subjective reality on the child such that the child had no choice but to adopt the parents’ reality as their own. Wh