ABSTRACT
A contextualized experience is one that can be recognized as that experience which it is, one that has been prepared to become part of a coherent life history, or else one that can be genuinely dismissed if there is no longer any need for it to play a role in one's own self-understanding. In any event, it is true to say that the seeds of traumatic response are sown in childhood, since it is in childhood that two of the requisite elements of traumatic response are generated, namely past uncontextualized experience along with the defensive mechanism that prevents the future contextualization of that particular experience. Sigmund Freud identified four types of unpleasurable repetition that contradict the theoretical predictions of a conceptual system based on the pleasure principle: (1) dreams in post-traumatic stress disorder; (2) the repetition of traumatic events in children's play; (3) the repetition of past conflicts in the transference; (4) the "daimonic" experience of a personal "destiny".
