ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that Freud's insight into trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his new understanding of personal and of collective history in the face of war, lies precisely in the striking and enigmatic leap that juxtaposes the nightmares of war to the child's game. It discusses Freud's enigmatic move in the theory of trauma from the drive for death to the drive for life, from the reformulating of life around the witness to death, to the possibility of witnessing and making history in creative acts of life. From the perspective of Freud's rethinking of life around its traumatic significance, the child's game thus peculiarly re-enacts the incomprehensible moment of the mother's act of leaving and reshapes the very life of the child as the unconscious witness to the death he has survived. The origin of life as the death drive is itself repeated, Freud audaciously suggests, and is repeated precisely in the form of a game (Spiel).
