25

How can the individual psyche deal psychologically with events of external reality whose immensity leads us to define them as traumatic? This question is approached through two clinical cases: a therapeutic consultation with a nine-year-old girl three years after the violent earthquake which she survived, maimed and in mourning; and an excerpt from the therapy of a young woman who experienced genocide at the age of nine and went into exile. Despite the wide differences between these two cases, the idealization process (of the self or of thinking) are in both cases essential elements for the psychological treatment of trauma, with a function of narcissistic reinforcement and desexualisation, which the transference brings to light and transforms.