ABSTRACT
In the last 20 years, trauma has emerged as the major concept bridging legal, medical, and media discourses for representing the impact of psychological suffering on the individual and the social life of people across the globe. Much debated within the medical and clinical communities in regard to its scope and causality, trauma characteristically reflects oppressive effects of anxiety, injurious forms of repetition, and maladaptive structures of ideology and social interaction. This chapter examines the history and meaning of the term in psychoanalytic discourse and the impact of the term on discourses external to psychoanalysis.
