ABSTRACT
The trauma field has been essentially relinquished to trauma theorists who tend to lack an understanding of dynamic unconscious processes that entail conflict, fantasy and actively motivated defenses. In proposing to treat the “traumatized” psyche, both a repression-based model of mental functioning and one that incorporates dissociatively produced segregated units of experiencing are required. Psychoanalysis may have been set back following the Freud–Janet split by disregarding the traumatic reality of sexual abuse and incest as well as dissociation per se for many reasons—including clinical, methodological and identity politics. Analytic treatment is particularly challenging because unconscious conflict and fantasy in traumatized patients is often more difficult to access because traditional interpretive methods primarily rely on freely associative, verbalizable material, whereas archaic fantasy structures associated with the trauma tend to be acted out nonverbally, often in the patient–analyst relationship.
