Psychoanalysis and Trauma

Abstract

This article articulates some of the problems that surround the use of the term trauma in psychoanalytic theory and suggests that the key element for a theory of pathogenesis and mental functioning is not the either/or of external versus internal causation or trauma versus drive. Rather, it is an understanding of whether, or to what extent, the raw data of existential experience is or is not transformed into psychological experience. From this perspective, trauma is whatever outstrips and disrupts the psyche’s capacity for representation or mentalization. Absent the potential for mental representation, these events and phenomena are historical only from an external, third-person perspective. Until they are mentalized, they remain locked within an ahistorical, repetitive process as potentials for action, somatization, and projection.

Notes

1. ¹See Volkan (1997; 2004) for a description of how large social groups and large group identities may contribute important components to a given individual’s capacity to respond to potentially traumatic stressors.

2. ²The extent to which Freud’s early patients actually reported memories of incest and childhood sexual abuse, as opposed to having these events reconstructed and interpreted to them by Freud, remains an open question. See Levine (1990b) for a detailed discussion.

3. ³Rangell (1967) is an exception to this neglect. He begins his comprehensive essay on the metapsychology of psychic trauma by noting that, “The practising psychoanalyst or clinical psychiatrist deals essentially with the results of traumas …” (p. 51).

4. ⁴This, of course, also implies the freedom to “not communicate” to preserve one’s integrity and potential for future creative manifestations (personal communication, D. Scarfone 2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Howard B. Levine

Howard B. Levine is a member of the faculty and a supervising analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP), a member of the faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England East (PINE), and is in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.