ABSTRACT
The misappropriation of reason in service of an unquestioned rule of common sense is often most evident in the context of the cognitive-behavioral paradigm that has come to dominate mainstream psychotherapy. Following a participatory line of thinking, Owen Barfield argues: "if the particles, or the unrepresented, are in fact all that is independently there, then the world we all accept as real is in fact a system of collective representations". Working with their patients as "co-researchers", Davoine and Gaudilliere argue that all trauma is ultimately grounded in the collective concerns of history. Therapeutic work entails the effort to symbolize something that was not inscribed in the historical record. The reality of trauma persists in its remaining unmoved by the passage of time, and its facticity is in some sense jeopardized precisely when the traumatic reality of the unspeakable is rendered into words. This approach appears to have parallels with Henrich's therapeutically suggestive notion of the Denkraum.
