ABSTRACT
Traumatic experience sometimes generates emptiness of figuration that swallows up any possible form of representation, prior to fantasy. This chapter considers that, in the clinical work, the analyst's job is not just to lift repression in order to encourage memory and remembering. In the words of A. Green, analyst forms an absent meaning. The analyst creates the conditions necessary to enable traumatic experience to be qualified, thought about, experienced, and spoken about, beyond historical truth but close to experiential truth in its perceptive quality. In patients subjected to traumatic experiences, the narrative ego is emptied of substance, an impersonal voice coming from far away, from some unknown memory or forgetfulness. Dreams and dream production may operate then as an equivalent of remembrance. It is through dreams that the subject reappears; their perceptive intensity expresses a form of remembrance of the traumatic experience.
