ABSTRACT
In its forgetting of trauma’s importance for Freud, who later repeatedly stresses that this first approach should not be ignored, we could understand the return of trauma in psychiatry as the return of the repressed in psychoanalysis. The Real is the impossible of reality. It is what cannot be encountered, what cannot possibly be thought and, in Jacques Lacan’s view, the real is usually embodied in the mother. By definition, the traumatic real is thus inassimilable to the psyche. Trauma therefore appears belatedly, through a retroactive movement. The second moment is also the moment of repression. When it confronts the child, this question of the Other’s desire appears incomprehensible or traumatic. Encountered in early childhood, its enigma leaves behind a trace—a mnemic trace. The cause of the trauma’s invasiveness will not necessarily be the event itself, and the source of the traumatic effect will not always be what one imagines.
