Trauma destroys meaning, and psychoanalysis is not the best way to understand how this happens. Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis, by Werner Bohleber helped me reach this conclusion, which is not his. Bohleber is a former president of the German Psychoanalytic Association, and editor of Psyche.
Bohleber holds that the psychoanalytic theory of trauma needs two models:
- the Freudian psycho-economic model, and
- the hermeneutic object relations model, as he calls it.
The “economic” model captures the experience of being overwhelmed by an excess of violence, anxiety, and stimulation that cannot be mentally bound, largely because the ego was unprepared. The term economic, in this context, refers to currency of mental energy, or libido.
The object relations model explains the feelings of abandonment, including the destruction of emotional bonds with others, as well as the inability to connect with good objects, or feelings, in oneself, associated with trauma. (pp. 97-98)
But even using both models, the psychoanalytic account faces a fundamental problem, “the almost complete separation of psychic and external realities within psychoanalytic reality.” External reality is often devalued by psychoanalysts because it challenges the primacy of unconscious experience (p. 102). The most important thing to know about trauma, says Bohleber, is that it is a “brute fact” that takes place in historical time (p. 109).
