Psychoanalytical Coaching for Extreme Situations

The problem of reacting, living and adapting the psyche to extreme situations is becoming increasingly relevant in the rapidly changing world of recent decades. Unpredictable geopolitical changes, natural disasters, the global pandemic, terrorist attacks - all these factors have become a constant accompanying background to the lives of our contemporaries. The study is devoted to the theoretical understanding of psychoanalytic concepts devoted to the details of the processing of extreme situations experience. A detailed analysis of the role of children's experience in the formation of stress reactions in the psychoanalytic paradigm is carried out: the process of formation of protective mechanisms at different stages of a child's psychosexual development is considered, the main factors of the process of controlling and suppressing anxiety in childhood are summarized. A significant part of the work is devoted to the study of such concepts as collective and transgenerational trauma, an analysis of the accumulated effect of traumatic family experience and its impact on different generations of the family in our country over the past century is given. The empirical part of the study presents the results of practical work with clients who have experienced events that they assess as extreme: the work was carried out in the approach of psychoanalytic coaching in both individual and group formats.  Keywords: extreme situation, psychoanalysis, adaptation, stress, collective and transgenerational trauma, psychosexual development, protective mechanisms