ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the complex relationship between trauma and the psychotic state. It discusses the traumatic effect of psychosis on the psyche, and describes the inability to tolerate frustration in the psychotic state after examining infantile emotional trauma as an experience conducive to the onset of illness in adult life. Piera Aulagnier links psychotic illness to maternal violence, the violence practised in normal circumstances by a mother on her child to structure his reality sense. The likely conditioning factor responsible for psychopathology will in this case be emotional trauma. The memory of the psychotic breakdown tends to be blotted out as if it had never happened. The traumatic anxiety accompanying the psychotic process results in loss of the symbolic universe and destruction of the self, as in extreme traumatic catastrophes. According to Wilfred R. Bion, in dealing with emotions a psychotic exhibits the same difficulties as he has in formulating the thoughts that ought to modify frustration.
