ABSTRACT
The interpersonal and relational nature of the human mind leads to a new understanding of the unconscious as a dual, relational, and interpersonally construed unconscious. Part of this “new unconscious” is also what can be defined the “unrepressed unconscious” and its neurobiological/neuroscientific version of “implicit memory,” rooted in the amygdala, within the limbic system. Traumatic memories are imprinted in the limbic system, where the impressions and relational matrix of our first two years of life are stored, since the hippocampus (declarative memory) does not function until the second year of life.
Complex PTSD (the negative consequences for the human psyche of long-term abuse, deprivation, or incest) testifies to the particularly serious aftereffect of trauma of human agency, and therefore also of the importance of a good relational base for optimal development. Trauma of human agency creates the most destructive foundation for future psychopathology, namely dissociation. In contrast to Freud’s understanding of psychopathology as being based on repression, the most severe disorders (from borderline to psychotic in a continuum of severity) is based on dissociation, which only stems from interpersonal trauma, not from natural catastrophes. Dissociation was not central in Freud’s understanding of psychopathology since he disavowed the relevance of real interpersonal trauma (mostly abuse, which he called “seduction”) in favor of a conflictual and phantasmatic theory of trauma.
