| Abstract: | The concept of psychic trauma has undergone an inflationary extension in recent years. Various authors cite real stress situations as the reason for psychical disorders and no longer regard them as part of a syndrome (“Psychotraumatology”). Trauma is expressly raised to the level of an influencing factor with an absolute status as a pattern that serves to explain psychical experience and behavior with no need for further explanation or reflection. In the present article, the author describes and criticizes these trends in research, and as a reminder to the existence of alternative models he considers the view elaborated by Fenichel, in which trauma can be understood not as the reason for certain after-effects, but as the result of various influencing factors. On the basis of the studies by Hillel Klein and the works of Jean Améry, it is shown that even extreme stress situations are processed by the afflicted persons as life experiences of their own. These drastic real events are analysed expressly not only with regard to the pathogenic effect by which they flood the subject’s ego. It is shown that these experiences encounter an individual, specific and highly varied subject by virtue of his constitution and life history, and are processed in an individual way by him. The assumptions about a regularly occurring, distinct and supraindividually valid effect of real events, therefore, have to be rejected. It is the author’s conviction that the use of the term trauma is unacceptable if the analysis of effects of real events fails to take into consideration the individual’s personality structure and life experience and the perceptual attitudes and sensitivities determined by them. The author calls for applications of the term trauma to be reconsidered in view of the ways in which its meaning has been stretched and overdetermined as described here. |
