ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the affect-trauma frame of reference, derived from Sigmund Freud's thinking up to 1897. Its essence lies in the emphasis on external events as instigators of pathology, and on the role played by trauma and "charges of affect" in normal and abnormal mental functioning. The idea that a repressed traumatic experience may lie behind the patient's psychopathology, and the hope that this can be recovered, together with the abreaction (catharsis) of the associated emotions, still affects the psychoanalytic treatment of the neuroses. In the affect-trauma frame of reference, as in others, it is regarded as a psychological organization, within which psychological processes occur, and is conceived of as being relatively rudimentary in early childhood, increasing in complexity during the course of development. In the affect-trauma frame of reference, pathological processes are seen as particular processes of adaptation to a disequilibrium in the mental apparatus resulting from an intense charge of affective energy associated with certain memories.
