ABSTRACT
The debate on trauma has turned out to be one of the main issues of psychoanalysis in the last years, shaping and challenging exist-ing theoretical concepts. After Freud’s revision of the seduction theory in 1897 and years of silence and paralysis in the psychoanalytic community, few tried to question Freud’s verdict of unconscious early childhood conflicts underlying all trauma (Freud, 1904-1905, 19161917a). One of the few psychoanalysts to challenge Freud was Ferenczi (1931). He insisted that denial of all outside, factual reality necessarily leads to wrong conclusions and to preconceived explanations of neurotic phenomena based on psychic dispositions. Ferenczi is one of the pioneers of trauma research, anticipating most current scientific knowledge on trauma. He recognised the destructive force of all traumatic experience, which produces, as he pointed out, “a dead piece of the Ego” as well as agony, splitting, and numbing. He acknowledged the traumatised person’s desperate need to reenact the suffering in therapy, because of the persisting and innate inability to describe or name the traumatic experience (Ferenczi, 1933).
