ABSTRACT
The catastrophes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, wars, the Holocaust, racist and ethnic persecution, as well as the increase in social violence and the newly developed awareness of violence in families, and maltreatment and sexual abuse of children, have made the development of a theory and technique of traumatization and its consequences an urgent task in psychoanalysis. For a long time, trauma and its consequences, political and social violence, was not accorded the status that it should have been in psychoanalysis. During the early period of his practice, in the treatment of female patients who had developed hysterical symptoms, Sigmund Freud was confronted with episodes of sexual seduction in the post-puberty phase of their development. Although psychoanalysts dealt with the pathogenic effects of developmental deficits in children, the traumatic reality of sexual abuse and incest was largely disregarded.
