ABSTRACT
S. Freud put mental trauma on the clinical agenda in the 1890s, when he took neurosis to be a mix of old “traumas”, meaning loosely emotional tensions, stresses, or upsets, relived in disguise. Toward 1900 his focus gradually shifted away from relatively recent “traumas”, or pathogenic material such as he had been finding behind neuroses, to their presumed infantile originals. As historic case studies of individual traumatic reliving show, a purely emotional upset can traumatize on a par with an experience of bodily violence. This loony, lyrical monologue conveys the subjective experience of traumatic reliving with unique intensity and connotative power. It starkly renders the fluid form and trance-like feel of it—of rerunning a fateful, fatal traumatic course with deep foreboding the whole way. Pure reliving rings all the truer to readers, to judge by the broad and lasting appeal of works that turn on it.
