ABSTRACT
To judge by the historic cases, the most widely shared features of individual traumatic reliving are guilt felt for the trauma itself and especially a sense of acting under a higher constraint, as if on binding orders received unconsciously as in hypnosis. Individuals reliving traumas also tend to gain uncanny persuasiveness over others for the purpose while overriding any obstructive inhibitions or scruples of their own in the process. The jagged parallel between ways of reliving individual and collective traumas respectively gives no hint of which kind, if either, developed first in evolutionary time. But a comparison of the individual with the collective forms of reliving is strongly suggestive. There is no reliving a trauma knowingly, for a reliving must preserve a preponderant conscious uncertainty as to its outcome in order for it to be traumatic in its turn. A typical candidate for reliving a trauma could not be profiled.
