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. When a child’s mind is captured in this way—what Stern calls identification with negation—the result is an unconscious bondage to the internalized negating other which can be disabling to the senses of self, personal agency, and realness. With extended clinical examples in every chapter, Stern brings the reader into the depths of each patient’s airless world and the co-created needed relationship that ultimately, fitfully transforms it. Written in a detailed yet accessible style, this book is