ABSTRACT
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex area of deep concern for psychoanalysis despite recent attempts to oversimplify it as a traumatically induced, but not necessarily analyzable, meaningful symptom constellation related to early conflict and other areas of inner life. Like R. B. Carr’s work, most clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic studies of PTSD today are intersubjectively and relationally based, and focus on adult-onset trauma in which the present compelling and forceful traumatic effect overwhelms cognitive capacity to symbolize past early trauma and to analyze meaningful connections between the two. Survival guilt and activation of overwhelming aggression was, and had been for a long time, a prominent feature in several of the cases. The emergence of these concerns and the anxieties they exacerbated in what they expected to be a short-term treatment of PTSD appeared to prompt early unilateral termination.
