Psychoanalysis in Trauma: On Trauma and Its Traumatic History in Psychoanalysis
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Abstract
This paper focuses on trauma, particularly the history of trauma in psychoanalysis—a highly traumatic history. The author suggests, using data unearthed primarily over the past twenty-five years and with reference to Caruth's work on trauma theory, that the psychoanalytic exploration of trauma itself followed a traumatic course and therefore also needed a double, belated emergence to find a “voice” and hearing. This traumatic course had its stormy inception in the early period of psychoanalysis. The work of Sandor Ferenczi, especially in his last years, brought to the fore the crucial importance of actual childhood trauma and its impact on personality and on the analytic treatment. These claims were a daring contradiction of Freud's view that memories of sexual abuse are based on instinct-driven fantasies. Furthermore, Ferenczi investigated daring therapeutic methods for coping with the reliving of traumatic overstimulation, terror, and dissociation in treatment, with the analyst serving as an important r...