ABSTRACT
Freud's earliest observation about psychic trauma, which remains the cornerstone of our understanding it, goes back to something he learned from Charcot (Freud, 1886), which he confirmed in his own work (1893a; Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895), namely, that some hysterical attacks are the aftereffects of unbearable experiences in the past. The nature of the traumatic situations the Freud postulated in 1893 was vague: "a single major fright (such as a railway accident, a fall, etc.) ... [as well as] other events which are equally well calculated in their nature to operate as traumas (e.g., fright, mortifications, disappointments)" (1893a, p. 152). While the question of sexual seduction provided a temporary distraction, in the renunciation of that theory Freud was able to focus on the fundamental area of psychoanalytic observations: psychic reality. The emphasis on the nature of the subjective experiences, as well as on its unconcscious aspects, directed the main interest to the "final common path" in the traumatic event—the emotion involved. And so, in the "Studies on Hysteria," Breuer and Freud (1893—1895) give us the following definition:
In traumatic neuroses the operative cause of illness is not the trifling psychical injury of the effect of fright—the psychical trauma. In an analogous manner, our investigations reveal, for many, if not most, hysterical symptoms, precipitating causes.... Any experience which calls up distressing affects—such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain—may operate as trauma of this kind [p. 5-6],
On the same page (6) the authors recount that "to [their] great surprise" the hysterical symptoms disappeared when the meanings were recovered from repression and brought into consciousness, but that "recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result." Here, then, is one paradigm of psychic trauma: A person is confronted with overwhelming affects; in other words, his affective responses produce an unbearable psychic state that threatens to disorganize, perhaps even destroy, all psychic functions. Strachey (1961) pointed out that "the notion of the ego being 'overwhelmed' ... occurs very early in Freud's writings. See, for instance, a mention of it in Part II of his first paper on 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' [1894], But it plays a prominent part in his discussions of the mechanism of the neuroses in Draft K of January 1, 1896, in the Fliess correspondence" (p. 57). It should be noted, however, that Freud left open the question of what makes an affect unbearable or overwhelming. One's first impression of Freud's words is that any intensive and painful affect could be traumatic, but we know that usually this is not the case. This naivete contributes greatly to the confusion, which was multiplied as the concept of psychic trauma was expanded and built upon.