Reality as Trauma

Trauma is usually understood as reaction to an exceptional disorganizing event. Instead, it can be recognized as the underlying fabric of everyday experience, entailing reality’s fundamental unpredictability, constant change, and the inevitable erosions wrought by sickness, aging, and death. This paper draws on Ferenczi’s psychoanalytic thinking to develop this view of reality as trauma, and to suggest a shift in interpersonal self-regard as central to psychoanalytic change.