Volume 17 - Number 1-2 - June-September 2010
Pages: 1 - 163
Binion, R. (2010). Binion responds. Clio’s Psyche, 17(1-2), 143.
Binion Responds
Abstract
In this response article, the author replies to the commentaries on his essay “Reliving with Freud,” the lead essay of the Binion Symposium on Traumatic Reliving with Freud. He says the commentaries have shown that the essay misleads when read in isolation from the book it introduces. That book examines traumatic reliving in several historical cases, some literary classics, and many films. He defines reliving as the spontaneous, unwitting re-enactment of a traumatic episode, and distinguishes it from traumatic stress syndrome and from deliberate remembrance. He also separates it from trauma-based chronic symptoms (Dauersymptome), from posttraumatic stress disorder, and from Freud’s repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang). He maintains that Freud, like Pierre Janet, understood reliving as a stunted form of remembering. He contends that Freud then blocked further insight by holding that all patterned later behavior has an infantile original, a rule he judges wrong however Freud arrived at it. He says the commentators gave little attention to reliving itself and concentrated on Freud as researcher, who does not otherwise figure in the book. He concludes that the book concerns a widespread pattern of human behavior and its depiction in literature and film, which he holds has not yet been recognized as a distinct phenomenon.
historic, misleading, Pierre Janet, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychohistory, “Reliving with Freud,” repetition compulsion, Sigmund Freud, traumatic reliving
All these thoughtful comments have brought home to me how misleading my “Reliving with Freud” is when read in isolation. The book it serves to introduce explores the mechanism of traumatic reliving in several historic cases, a few literary classics, and movie after movie—not the traumatic stress syndrome, and not deliberate remembrances either, but spontaneous and unsuspecting re-enactments of a traumatic episode.
Freud recognized reliving to be a stunted form of remembering. (So, by the way, did genial Pierre Janet, whom I confined to endnotes, perhaps wrongly.) But on top of this important recognition, Freud then blocked further insight into the mechanism by his rule of an infantile original for all patterned behavior in later life. However he came by this rule, it is wrong.
I was at pains to dissociate traumatic reliving not only from trauma-based chronic symptoms (Freud’s “Dauersymptome”), but also from posttraumatic stress disorder (to begin with, traumatic reliving involves no defining stress or disorder) as well as from what Freud called a “repetition compulsion” (“Wiederholungszwang”). But traumatic reliving itself: its focal concern, got short shrift from my commentators as compared with Freud the researcher, who does not even figure in the rest of my book. This book focuses rather, I repeat, on that fairly ubiquitous pattern of human behavior as well as the ways in which it has been depicted in literature and film without yet having been duly recognized as the distinct phenomenon it is.
Page 143
How to cite this article
Binion, R. (2010). Binion responds. Clio’s Psyche, 17(1-2), 143.
