ABSTRACT
Trauma has been an important concept in psychotherapy right from the beginning. The important function of shaking in trauma recovery has been rediscovered by contemporary therapists. Freud initially believed that the hysterical crisis removed the hysterical symptom "immediately and permanently", allowing the renewed flow of unlocked memories along with emotional discharge. Belief in the clinical efficacy of the hysterical crisis led to the first of many therapeutic disappointments suffered by practitioners over the last century or so. This chapter suggests that what is repressed by mainstream therapy, and what returns repeatedly in the form of trauma/abreaction theory, is embodiment. Hysteria itself, on one level, was the forcible return of the body into a culture which denies it; but it returned not as embodiment. The difficulties and dilemmas, and how to find an appropriate therapeutic response to trauma, as well as several other aspects of embodied relationship, can be illuminated through complexity theory.
