Many who study trauma from a psychoanalytic perspective turn to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in order to make sense of the apparent desire of people to repeat unpleasant experiences. Why, the sensible person wonders, would a traumatized person keep repeating a horrible experience, whether it be war-time trauma, or the trauma of an abusive childhood? In this context, the term “repeating” covers multiple forms of repetition, from flashbacks and nightmares, to acting-out an original trauma, in which, for example, a woman who was abused as a young girl continues to choose abusive partners.
Freud begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle with what he calls the traumatic neuroses, brought about by accidents and wartime trauma. However, he quickly turns from “the dark and dismal topic of traumatic neurosis,” to children’s play (pp. 50-52). The reader is at first disappointed. Should not Freud have paid more than passing attention to the psychological suffering of so many who had just returned from a war that inflicted immense psychic suffering on its combatants? He does, but one has to search for it. Or create it.
