What is trauma?

The emphasis about Trauma started approximately with the 20th century and is more or less contemporary with psychoanalysis and the shock that civilization sustained with Word War I. Freud was the first to propose a doctrine of trauma as a cause of discontent through his discovery of the unconscious. Freud’s discovery opened the way for Lacan to formulate the social bonds established in terms of discourses, as regulators of social bonds between bodies through language.

Trauma is an encounter with the Real, something that cannot be understood, represented, symbolized, and therefore starts to have a fundamental place in the life of every speaking-being.

When the subject does not have the words to symbolically place the trauma suffered, others manifestations like the affection of anguish, symptoms, dreams, nightmares can become an important resource.

Trauma is one of the names given to break-in of a real that falls upon someone, a real in front of which the subject “can’t do anything about it”, except carrying its consequences.

Psychoanalysis is fundamental here, because by introducing the subject in his singularity is the only discourse that can draw on unconscious sources, that is a condition for finding new resources, even, self-remuneration.

This perspective allows the single subjects to finally inscribe the unnameable in their individual history, to integrate this name into history and find a place, to collect the new responses to pass from the claim to the “subject’s resources”.

A way to draw from the subject’s resources is the oblivion, as Lacan describes it in 1967: “not remembering what is known”.

This testifies that is important not to lose what remains to be transmitted to the next generations of the survivors.