ABSTRACT
Current analytic clinical practice is paying increasing attention to the effects of primary traumas, generated by the checks or failures encountered while creating the first bonds with the maternal object. However, the advances in theorising about trauma certainly did not follow a straight path nor were devoid of radical reversals in perspective, from the earliest theory of seduction, through the Studies on Hysteria and the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, to arrive at the Moses and Monotheism, a paper in which Freud for the first time pointed at narcissism and narcissistic wounds as factors in the genesis of traumatic conditions. A trauma is created on the margins of the non-portrayable, leaving behind, though, in the child's mind, indelible, latent, perceptive traces waiting to be given an affective even before a symbolic meaning. Every intersubjective experience will make the past traumatic impact resound, giving rise to an unbearable psychic pain.
