ABSTRACT
This chapter examines various forms of knowing massive psychic trauma and the circumstances under which they arise. Massive psychic trauma breaks through the stimulus barrier and defies the individual's ability to formulate experience. Erecting barriers against knowing is often the first response to such trauma. Understanding the level of traumatic memory is crucial in knowing where therapeutic intervention must focus. For the survivor who is bombarded by unintegrated percepts of the past, deficit is more prominently active than defense, and thus concerns around cohesion of the self and fragmentation anxiety take precedence over conflict. In the individual who uses traumatic metaphors, defense predominates over deficit, for knowing on this level is the product of the transference of a fantasy rather than of a lived experience. The connections and movements between traumatic event, memory, meaning, interpretation, and character structure are inevitably obscured.
