Sentenced to Life: Reflections on the Inability to Bear Vitality, Following the Movie Turtles Can Fly

Abstract

The paper focuses on psychic states in which living and bearing one's vitality have become hindered or totally obstructed, either as a result of a primary trauma or of a late-onset trauma. The author relates especially to patients who have been severely traumatized and have withdrawn into encapsulated states with schizoid/autistic-like features that create complex challenges in therapy. The paper weaves together clinical cases with theoretical understandings and with a discussion of the Kurdish movie Turtles Can Fly, in which many orphan Kurdish refugee children try to survive emotionally the traumatic life they have been going through. The author discusses the complex states of mind of the patients presented and of the orphans in the movie, who are sentenced to life, having lost all their hope and ability to tolerate their own vitality or that of others, due to extreme traumas. Consequently an encounter between themselves and another person, including a therapist/analyst, frequently becomes a flooding experience that is beyond their abilities to assimilate, being experienced as an annihilating threat to one's emotional existence and being in danger of creating states of a therapeutic and undigestible excess for which the term toxemia of therapy is suggested.