ABSTRACT
The problem of trauma and the ‘reality’ of trauma occupy a central place in Freud’s thinking in Moses. Freud’s research in the late 1930s is fuelled by his renewed interest in external reality and the defences employed against it (see in particular Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence, 1938b). Freud thus returns to what, at the end of the last decade of the nineteenth century, had been the starting point of his vision of pathology and human development as he explored the relationship between reality, memory and imagination (an exploration reflected in his copious correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess; Freud 1897). Of those years, 1897 has gone down in history and in the iconography of psychoanalysis as the year of the ‘neurotica crisis’. But this crisis, linked to the discovery of the Oedipus complex, is only the epilogue of a path which I feel needs to be resumed in order to highlight the specific nature of the Freudian ‘discovery’ as against discoveries and inventions in other spheres of science or the arts. The fascination of being present at the epiphany of a science is not, however, the only reason that pushes me in this direction.
