Faculty Bibliography

This study sought to explore the relationship between early memories of body trauma, specifically injury, illness and/or abuse, the development of object representations, and the tendency to express emotional experience through somatic channels. Based on psychoanalytic theories that situate the development of healthy object relations in the context of mother-infant dyad, it was hypothesized that early memories of body damage would be reflective of chronic misattunements in the earliest, sensory dominated stage of development. One hundred and forty-six college students' early memories were studied. Early memories were assessed for the presence of body damage, and were then separated into two study groups; Body Damage and No Body Damage. There were 42 women and 29 men in the Body Damage group (N = 71), and 45 women and 30 men (N = 75) in the comparison group. Subjects also completed the Life Events Checklist, Health Utilization and Symptom Questionnaires, as well as a Generic Distress Scale that was designed to correlate with a wide range of standard measures of psychological health and distress. Early memories were assessed for levels of object relations using the Social and Cognitive Object Relations Scale (SCORS). Two by two factorial