ABSTRACT
Severe trauma wipes out the mind, resulting in a massive erasure of thought. The myth of Oedipus has been a central organizing myth for psychoanalysis, framing understanding of how people know what they don't and shouldn't know. Patients in their fragmented traumatic states cannot accrue insight or knowledge. "Traumatic blackout" is the term uses for the moment or stretch of life during which overwhelming traumatic affect takes center stage and leads to a shutdown of thinking, self-reflection, reality testing, and conscious remembering. Extreme traumatization, be it genocide or childhood sexual abuse, defies knowing because at its core lies failure of the empathic human dyad. The experience of human responsiveness comes to be nonexistent. The self as interpreter of experience and creator of meaning can no longer function once impacted by massive psychic trauma. The ensuing absence of internal dialogue means that creation of internal knowledge of the traumatic experience is impossible.
