ABSTRACT
The concept of psychic trauma is Freud's earliest analytic offspring. Even the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to psychoanalysis the extension in meaning of the word to include mental as well as physical trauma. In 1914, Freud returned to the subject of trauma after a number of years in his paper "From the history of an infantile neurosis", commonly referred to as "the Wolf Man case". In order to explain the traumatic effect of the dream, at the age of four, Freud returns to his old theory of Nachtraglicheit. He assumed that affective force was added to the existing memory traces of the earlier observation because of the greater development of the patient's sexuality. The chapter provides a brief account of the history of the concept of psychic trauma. Traumatic experience is always imminent, and parental love, care, and understanding are required to keep it at bay or to counteract it.
