ABSTRACT
Psychic trauma is at the centre of all forms of psychopathology, something therapists should, as a rule, keep in mind in order to research the profile of the trauma as soon as circumstances might allow. Obviously caught in his time and culture, Sigmund Freud was unable to reach a comfortable position from which to perceive the discrimination between outside events considered as real and traumatic and inner oedipal pressures considered neurotic. By discriminating between outer and inner realities, Freud had deprived the mind of a diachronic sense, conceiving the presence of instincts as something completely alien to any historical becoming, as a sort of entelechy. Several issues interfered also with Freud being able to provide trauma with a predominant role in the aetiology of mental suffering and anxiety as we might recognise it today. A. Miller criticised Freud’s stubbornness in maintaining the primacy of the Oedipus complex over the “seduction theory” and attempted to find a solution outside psychoanalysis.
