Being Thrown Into the World Without Informed Consent

Abstract

A traumatic event strikes people without their knowledge and willing agreement or permission. In other words, informed consent is missing at a crucial moment in their lives. But experiencing an event without consent does not always traumatize people. We are exposed to everyday events in our lives without consent. Indeed, as Loewald (2000) says, human beings are “born without informed consent” (p. 243). In this article, I attempt to explore and illustrate in what ways people are or are not traumatized by being exposed to an event without consent, viewed from the perspective of the “psychology of being human” (Togashi and Kottler, 2015). In a review of the case vignette of a female patient suffering from complex trauma, I demonstrate that the relation of informed consent to traumatic events is a form of existential anguish in response to living in our contemporary world, a world that is increasingly experienced as uncertain. Finally, I argue that the lack of informed consent to a traumatic event can violate one’s sense of responsibility, and show how we may undertake the process of granting informed consent retrospectively in a therapeutic process. Informed consent cannot be achieved in a human relationship, but is instead a dialogue through which people negotiate, discuss, talk, and attempt to understand each other when they happen to meet.

Keywords:

• ethical turn in psychoanalysis
• existential anguish
• informed consent
• psychology of being human
• sense of responsibility
• trauma

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this article, “Trauma: Being Thrown into the World Without Informed Consent,” was presented at the 2015 Taiwan Self Psychology Conference, December, 20, 2015, in Taipei.