ABSTRACT
The concept of trauma has remained a pillar of psychoanalytic thought since Freud's early studies of the origins of hysteria. Two distinct models of psychic trauma were already present in Studies on Hysteria. In one, trauma was the product of an unbearable, overwhelming affect state; in the other, it was caused by the emergence of an unacceptable idea, such as a fantasy. This isolated-mind conception of psychic trauma, emphasizing quantities of instinctual excitation overloading the capacities of an energy processing apparatus, has persisted within Freudian ego psychology. Even after Freud abandoned the "seduction theory", concluding that hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, he continued to grant trauma a central role in pathogenesis. Nevertheless, his conceptualization of trauma was thereafter tilted in a fateful direction, from trauma as caused by external events to trauma as produced by forces from within.
