ABSTRACT
Trauma is an integral part of the natural history of humanity throughout the millennia. Knowledge of the posttraumatic self requires a comprehensive understanding of how traumatic experiences impact the human psyche in its totality. The matrices of the mind, the plasticity of adaptive behavior, and the capacity of consciousness to transform the contextual meaning of reality, requires perspective on the experience of trauma that extends beyond psychiatric classifications of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and self-pathologies. The Trauma Archetype and Trauma Complex are critical and little-understood aspects of the posttraumatic self. The Trauma Archetype represents universal forms of traumatic experiences across culture, time, and history. The Trauma Complex is the unique, individual constellation of the trauma experience in cognitive-affective structures located in the self and intrapsychic processes. The Trauma Complex is a suprasystem that is hierarchical in nature and embeds a wide range of phenomena including PTSD and alterations in personality. The Trauma Archetype and Trauma Complex are yoked psychological phenomena that have very distinct characteristics shaped by the nature of the trauma experience and the cultural context in which it occurs.
