Reliving with Freud

Contriving unknowingly to repeat an especially painful experience in disguise, and more than once as circumstances permit, is a pattern of human behavior sufficiently distinct to deserve a technical name: episodic traumatic reliving. Sigmund Freud opened the way to understanding this bizarre phenomenon even though he never dealt with it clinically or even recognized it as an entity unto itself. He did see his early neurotic patients as continually reliving traumatic experiences—sometimes fresh, more often stale—but in a static form: condensed, compounded, and converted into stable symptoms. His early constructions on such symptomatic reliving, though they were in continual flux, are known collectively as his traumatic theory of neurosis, which was the forerunner of psychoanalysis proper.

Psychoanalysis proper is commonly dated from Freud’s abandonment, by the end of 1897, of his sudden, ephemeral, ill-conceived notion that all neurosis originates in early sexual abuse by elders and his recognition that such abuse is commonly fantasized by the child. It can be dated more consequently, if still less precisely, from Freud’s assumption, developed gradually thereafter in the late 1890s, that every adult neurosis derives from an infantile original whatever later disturbances it may reflect as well. On going psychoanalytical, Freud did not relinquish the idea that neurotics are all reliving distilled traumatic material, far from it, so long as the term traumatic is taken to cover upsets, fixations, conflicts, and forbidden impulses indifferently, as in his own loose initial usage; not until well into World War I did he settle on the strict and narrow sense of trauma as an

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unmanageably shattering experience of a kind with shell shock.

It bears restating and emphasizing for clarity’s sake that from first to last the neurotics within Freud’s purview were all reliving their traumatic material of the sort chronically, in the form of fixed, steady symptoms (what he called Dauersymptome), rather than re-enacting some whole traumatic episode or conjunction of episodes in a full-scale performance itself subject to further replay, as in the historic cases to be discussed below. By the early 1890s he already saw no difference among neuroses of whatever type (mainly hysterical or obsessional) with respect to such fundamentals as that, besides reconfiguring what he styled as traumatic material, they were always intermixed in some measure and were always sexual at bottom. It was to these shared fundamentals that, in the late 1890s, he added an obligatory childhood original, and ultimately an infantile original, for every neurosis. I propose to show that he did so for reasons theoretical rather than empirical and that in so doing he cut himself off from all further insight into traumatic reliving, whether chronic or episodic, in the stricter and narrower sense of trauma, just when—paradoxically—he had opened the way to understanding it.

According to the traumatic theory of neurosis that was Freud’s run-up to psychoanalysis, the traumatic material that neurotics were reliving was additive. Thus hysteria, as he put it in the context of his traumatic theory, “occurs only where [traumatic] events have piled up” (Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess [Letter to Wilhelm Fliess]1887-1904, ed. by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, 1986, p. 284 [21 IX 1897]). That is, some peculiarly painful or upsetting occurrence or circumstance, called a “precipitating event” or trigger trauma, would pull together lots of kindred, unassimilated traumatic material going back years or even decades in the depths of the sufferer’s mind and would fashion it into

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composite, chronic symptoms. While in his practice as he reported on it in letters to his close professional confidant of the time, Wilhelm Fliess, or in the volume of Studies in Hysteria that he co-authored with his senior neurological colleague Josef Breuer in 1895, one or another of those accumulated component traumas might well date from childhood or even infancy, this was a far cry from his later psychoanalytical theorem of a blueprint in infancy for every adult neurosis. His (originally Breuer’s) so-called “cathartic” therapy of the time consisted in teasing the traumatic material behind the patient’s symptoms out of oblivion or repression with the aid of hypnosis or, as a fall-back, suggestion and then inviting the patient to recognize how he or, more usually, she was reliving that pathogenic material through those symptoms. If the neurosis was curable, Freud held, such recognition would or should suffice to cure it.

A few examples from his own accounts of his practice will clarify the concepts and issues involved. The subject of his “first complete analysis of a hysteric” (Freud, Gesammelte Werke, I, p. 201), an unwed youngest daughter caring with mounting discouragement for a depressive widowed mother, converted her sense of having come to a painful standstill in life into crippling leg pains. These drew primarily on earlier rheumatic pains, on the memory of having bandaged her late, stricken father’s leg morning after morning while resting it on hers, and most recently on a tiring hike with a brother-in-law with whom she was secretly in love. It was after that hike that the dismal feeling of being stuck, of getting nowhere in life, came over her: hardly did she dismiss it from her mind as unworthy when it returned in body language. Concerning this last, quick conversion sequence Freud remarked, stretching the key term beyond recognition: “Just such moments are the ones to be called ‘traumatic’” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 235). After a parting flare-up at Freud for having teased her secrets out of her, the patient

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wound up cured.

In a comparable case of “traumatic summation,” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 242) a student singer choked off a whole middle pitch of her voice after having all too long and too often swallowed her hate for an abusive father; some time later her fingertips started tingling when she angrily brushed away, as she graphically put it, the unbearable latest one of a lifelong series of unjust imputations against her by her elders.

In another young patient, a huge backlog of her father’s sexual violence, real or imaginary, against her mother and herself crystallized into an obsessional neurosis after the gory climax of her seeing her mother bleed from the uterus. A young wife in treatment with him suffered from phobias that threw back to her elder sister’s scary middle-of-the-night internment during their girlhood and, beyond that, to the guilty secret they shared of having once been sexually used together by their father. Another patient got a head pain at age 15 for fear of her grandmother’s piercing gaze: the pain soon went into remission, only to recur as a fixed symptom before Freud’s piercing gaze some thirty years later. A spinster in his care suffered from fantasized taunts by neighbors about her having been jilted: the taunts reconfigured a repressed memory of a lodger’s having suddenly thrust his penis into her hand without a follow-up. And Freud traced yet another patient’s melancholic sense of being worthless to her discovery at age 14 that she had an imperforate hymen.

In only the first of these sample cases, that of the crippling leg pains, did Freud claim a cure. He specified in Studies in Hysteria that by his cathartic method he could cure only acquired hysteria, hence by extension only acquired neuroses of whatever kind. In what he called his “model” case of acquired hysteria (Freud, Werke, I, p. 180) the sufferer was a young Scottish governess in Austria whose widowed

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employer dashed her fond hopes of marrying him when he dumped on her in a rage for permitting a visitor to kiss his children in her care. Some months later he angrily forbad a cigar-smoking guest in turn to kiss them, whereupon the lass’s sense of smell left her, replaced by an imaginary odor of cigar smoke. Her hysteria vanished when Freud brought home to her how in her symptoms her employer’s scolding of the cigar-smoker was fronting for his scolding of her, “the really operative trauma” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 179), during which she had smelled precisely nothing for want of anything to smell.

A comparable case, and presumable lightning cure, was that of an 18-year-old innkeeper’s daughter he met while resting on a holiday hike. She suffered from gasping anxiety attacks through which, as he ascertained and explained, she was reliving two traumatic memories together: one of having fought her father off in bed at age 14 without realizing at the time what he was up to, the other of having seen and heard him copulate with a cousin of hers a couple of years later.

By contrast, more dedicated hysterics might run him ragged when for every symptom he cured they would produce another, on the order of the choked voice and tingling fingers of the aspirant singer. The first patient he treated by hypnosis would hystericize for any number of traumatic reasons simultaneously, generating stomach aches, leg stiffness, cramps, snorting, fear of strangers, animal phobias, and hallucinations galore along with a consuming hate for her newborn second daughter.

But what he called his “toughest and most instructive case of hysteria” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 245) was the woman who developed a pain in the head from her grandmother’s and later Freud’s piercing gaze; she also got neck pains from swallowed insults, turned a rebuke that felt “like a slap in the face” into face pain, and massively literalized whatever

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pinched her heart or preyed on her mind; stretching it, she even managed to get her right hand to ache from worrying whether she could handle some new acquaintances right (Freud, Werke, I, pp. 244-251). Inexhaustibly inventive, she took Freud through several hundred successive cycles of symptoms deciphered and dissolved one by one only to be replaced immediately afterwards (Freud, Werke, I, p. 247] Nor were hysterics unique in this; dyed-in-the-wool compulsives might likewise preserve their compulsiveness intact beneath any number of its malleable showings.

All through the 1890s Freud puzzled over whether a neurotic disposition might be innate or how one was acquired otherwise. On balance he tended to consider that even a one-shot neurosis, such as the Scottish governess’s, presupposed a neurotic bent, and for that matter a specific neurotic bent, in her case hysterical (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 24-39 [1892-1893 enclosures]; pp. 182-186 [1 III 96]; etc.; Freud, Werke, I, pp. 180, 231, 260-264, etc.). Until late in the 1890s he toyed with the idea that a neurotic potential was activated by sexual abstinence or aberration. By this latter he meant first and foremost masturbation current or even past (a puzzling insistent idea of his, for if all hysterics, his preferred suspects, were masturbators, then their masturbating was irrelevant to their particular symptoms), but also a use of condoms, withdrawal, and even coital excess. In this vein he handily traced an old prude’s fits of anxiety to hints at sex in her sheltered life hard upon remarking that full cures were often possible when current sexual privation simply ceased. But this line of actual sexual causality could not very well be stretched to cover much of his case load, scramble as he might to find sexual “noxae” in patients seemingly free of them (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, p. 68 [21 V 1894]).

Some of his sickest neurotics were happily married from way back, and to Breuer he peevishly conceded in 1896 that neurosis is possible “in persons who, to be sure, did not

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masturbate” (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, p. 184 [1 III 96]). Besides, a sexual etiology of itself left the choice of neurotic type unexplained.

Meanwhile an alluring alternative to actual sexual frustration or aberration behind neurosis was suggested by indications of possible sexual abuse of his neurotics in their earliest years with the traumatic impact on them delayed until after they reached sexual maturity. If only all neurosis originated in such passive victimization, inborn neurotic proclivities could be scrapped, and the issue of who acquired a neurotic disposition, indeed maybe even for which kind of neurosis, could be resolved. Freud speculated eagerly along these lines in the mid-1890s. “I sense the following strict precondition,” he announced to Fliess in October 1895: “a primal (pre-pubertal) sexual experience with revulsion and fright for hysteria, with pleasure for obsessional neurosis” (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, p. 146 [8 X 95]). He returned to the charge a week later, specifying that the pre-pubertal sexual traumas took pathogenic effect only after puberty and hence only “as memories” (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, p. 147 [15 X 1895]). The very next day he declared himself almost certain of his new schema, with neuroses and even neurotic dispositions both now curable on that basis. He elaborated further on his felicitous construction after four more days, then reaffirmed its “basics” another eleven days later while also raising some doubt about “the pleasure-pain solution” (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 151-152 [31 X 1895]), presumably because it reopened the old issue of proclivities in the new form of why such experiences gave pain to some children and pleasure to others. Quelling this unwelcome doubt, he ushered in the year 1896 with what, joshing himself, he called “A Christmas Tale”: an extravagant comparison of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia that led off from the need for a pre-pubertal sexual original of the precipitating cause in each case. A pre-

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pubertal trauma was harmful, he now specified, only as a memory reactivated by a similar experience at puberty and reinforced by an inborn disposition (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 169-178 [1 I 1896, enclosure]).

A few months later he even reworked this schema so that the ages for primal sexual traumas matched up with hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia respectively to make a tight deterministic bundle. “There is more speculation in it than usual,” he conceded to Fliess (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, p. 201 [30 V 1896]). On this new theoretical high, Freud was claiming publicly by April 1896 that he had found pre-pubertal sexual abuse, typically at ages three or four, behind twelve female and six male neurotics all of whom he had cured accordingly “wherever circumstances permitted” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 414 [21 April 1896]).

He was to back off from this resounding claim in private some months later, considering above all that there was no telling reality from fantasy in the scenarios of early abuse that he had constructed out of his patients’ fragmentary associations to their symptoms, but also that he had been unable to effect even a single “real” cure on that basis (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 283-286 [21 IX 1897]). Not only did this last, private admission contradict his previous triumphant public claim; his previous triumphant public claim did not square with the public or private accounts he had given of his cases before 1896—any more for that matter than did his repeated affirmations in his later, psychoanalytical years that it was his patients who had kept steering him back to their early childhood.

Of his four main and eight secondary cases, all female, discussed by him in sufficient detail in Studies in Hysteria, only two involved pubertal and two pre-pubertal material of whatever kind. And of those twelve plus eight other neuroses discussed adequately there and in subsequent letters

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to Fliess through 1899, only two drew on sexual experiences going back to puberty, another four to late childhood, and a single one to infancy. Still worse, this last one, which confirmed for Freud “the inherent authenticity of infantile traumas” (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 314-315 [22 XII 1897]) even after his nominal about-face on that very issue, should sooner have strained his credulity even on his theoretical high, what with the patient claiming to remember that at six or seven months of age she had seen her mother nearly bleed to death from a sex wound inflicted by her father, that at two years of age she had been deflowered and infected with gonorrhea by the same penile offender, and that at age three she had witnessed a solo pantomime by her mother of fending off an anal-sexual assault in shrill protest.

With less blatant inconsequence he hailed one of the other cases of pre-pubertal abuse as “a new confirmation of the paternal etiology” (fathers being for him at that point the arch incestuous pedophiles) even though the old paternal abuse, far from festering under repression as required for traumatic effect, was fully conscious with the patient, affect inclusive, and on his own telling did not relate anyhow to her complaint of neurotic anxiety following from her brother’s committal for insanity (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 251-252 [28 IV 1897]).

In one of his 13 strictly post-pubertal cases of non-abuse, on the other hand, Freud regretted in so many words that “in all the patient’s intimate disclosures to me the sexual element…was completely lacking” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 160). The indications are that the radical turn in his thinking of the late 1890s to childhood sexual trauma as the source of neurosis was not fact but theory-driven, the facts themselves being reshaped by theory even as the theorist slept through many a consultation. To round out the record, the three psychoanalytical case histories that he was to publish in later years (Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man) famously showed

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him steering the patients’ thoughts back to sex in childhood whenever they went their own way instead.

Before he began speculating about early sexual abuse behind neurosis, Freud had seen childhood traumas as mere items in an associative series with no causal value even collectively unless and until they were catalyzed by a “precipitating event” later in life and thereby enlisted into symptomatic service, like those cumulative hates that his aspirant singer hurt her voice swallowing. With his child abuse schema, on the contrary, the causal onus shifted to early sexual traumas presaging future neuroses that would, though, remain in abeyance until some critical moment after puberty even while gathering lesser traumatic material into their orbit in the interim. This childhood impetus to a neurosis, albeit an impetus hanging fire, made the remote personal past actual. Previously Freud had considered that unconscious material could sustain a neurosis only if, however old, it had continuing existential relevance. Thus the innkeeper’s daughter was anxiously gasping in current fear of her father for having tattled on him to her mother, while conversely a massage and light hypnosis sufficed to cure a former singer whose jaws had been locked nearly shut for years from causes that were by then “evidently long since done and over with” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 237n).

On the child-abuse construction, by contrast, traumatic material no longer obsolesced. At the same time, on that construction as before, a childhood sex trauma could take neurotic effect in later life only as an unconscious memory: no change here. This no-change enabled Freud to put the child-abuse construction to rest all the more easily, memory alone being operant true or false—child abuse or no. By the same token, however, he implicitly and implausibly equated early scary sex phantasms with actual early sex traumas. He did so as well on the connected ground that imaginary child abuse couldn’t be told apart from real child abuse

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as reconstructed by him (precious few sex traumas or phantasms from later childhood, let alone infancy, were recollected by his patients themselves). The upshot was that to his mind a false memory might pack as much wallop as a true memory however long it had bided its traumatic time in abeyance. On this reckoning a girl would be equally prone to develop a guilt neurosis in later life if she had enjoyed being used by her father sexually or if she had only enjoyed imagining it. At the same time, in imputing to the fantasizing child an active role in acquiring a neurosis, Freud reopened the whole question of neurotic disposition, now recast as the question of which children tended to fantasize to future neurotic effect, and then to neurotic effect of which kind.

If Freud’s about-face on sex abuse in childhood as the stock source of neurosis was not as pinpointed in time as is commonly held, neither was it as pivotal in theory. He might still invoke his failed rule of child sex abuse behind every trauma some months after he had professedly scrapped it. Much more importantly, even after he did finally scrap it he still stuck to the childhood source of every neurosis, sex abuse or no. It is this sticking point that was fundamental for his transition to psychoanalysis proper: the childhood origin, next the childhood original, and soon afterwards the infantile original, of all neurosis. At first, in his letter to Fliess nominally writing off sex abuse in childhood as the single source of neurosis, he had reported himself ready to give up on two things along with it: on “the complete cure of a neurosis and the certain knowledge of its etiology in childhood” (Freud, Werke, I, pp. 237n, 284 [21 IX 1897]). In the event he gave up on neither, his about-face should logically have put him back where he had been before: with some tenacious neuroses deriving from childhood, even from sex abuse in childhood, but also some neuroses first acquired in adulthood, these being the most amenable to cure, and some inveterate, inborn neurotic dispositions incurable by his methods. However, rather

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than back off from the childhood source of neurosis with its irresistible built-in suggestion of deepest roots, he took a gigantic new step forward in that same direction over the following months and years. He part-discerned and part-contrived a normative schema of child development by psychosexual stages, with an inherent risk of a potentially pathogenic emotional fixation at one or another stage in case too little or too much gratification were forthcoming there. In the final reckoning, his infantile stages were to be narcissistic first and then predominantly oral, anal, and phallic by turns, with sex play and sex fantasies at every stage, and with a potential for psychosis, hysteria, and obsession respectively in the event of a hang-up at one of the first three stages.

Traumatic experiences at any point might also carry their own neurotic potential, particularly at the phallic stage culminating in the emotionally charged “Oedipus complex” with its built-in castration fear and its visions of parental intercourse soon mythified as the “primal scene” (Freud, pp. 312, 293 [15 X 1897]). This new schema eliminated the need for an inborn neurotic predisposition in case there was no such thing: developmental disturbances could be held accountable for all manner of neurotic afflictions. It also systematized the distinction between an acquired neurotic disposition and an acquired neurosis: the stronger a fixation on an infantile sexual aim, the less of a later reverse or frustration was needed for a neurosis to result. Finally—and this is the crucial point—on these new schematic terms no neurotic potential could be acquired in infancy, whether by trauma or by fixation, without a premonitory neurosis already ensuing in infancy, for any infantile trauma or fixation strong enough to generate an adult neurosis by delayed action was perforce symptomatic from the start. In Freud’s own formulation: “When a neurosis breaks out in later life, analysis invariably shows it to be a direct continuation of that infantile neurosis” (Freud, Werke, XI, p. 378). He saw to it that this was so in

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the analyses that he himself performed from there on out.

No adult neurosis without its infantile original: this new rule of Freud’s had its supportive counterpart in the prodigious theory of dreams that he developed along with his psychoanalytical theory of neurosis. The dream “contains in nuce the whole psychology of the neuroses,” he told Fliess along the way (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, p. 273 [7 VII 1897]). Just as on his psychoanalytical terms an adult neurosis conjoined an infantile original with a recent “precipitating event,” so too in his dream theory did a dream encode both together a disturbing thought pushed out of mind the day before and an infantile wish that it depicted as fulfilled. Despite this two-tier dynamic that he postulated in dreams and in neuroses alike, Freud accentuated the infantile in both cases. As he told Fliess in 1898, “Dream life seems to me to derive entirely from the residues of the prehistoric period of life (ages 1-3)—the same period which…alone contains the etiology of all the psychoneuroses….A recent wish leads to a dream only if it can link up with material from this prehistoric period…if [it] is an offspring of a prehistoric wish or can get itself adopted by one” (Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 329-330 [10 III 1898, stress added]). Likely his rule of infantile origination went from neuroses to dreams even if it is unclear which of the two emergent, mutually reinforcing theories influenced the other more. Whereas his child abuse theorem dates from the spring of 1896, he did not relegate the wish-function of dreams to their infantile component until 1898, when he did so by express analogy with the neuroses. He did so hesitantly in the first instance, moreover, and for many years in the abstract only. “The wish represented in a dream must be an infantile one,” he asserted flatly just once in The Interpretation of Dreams, completed in 1899, only to add some pages later that, whereas repressed sexual wishes from infancy “furnish the motive force for the formation of all psychoneurotic symptoms,” he would “leave it open

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whether sexual and infantile factors are required by the theory of dreams as well” (Freud, Werke, II-III, pp. 559, 611). Theory notwithstanding, the dreams that he recounted from first to last appear to have originated in every case not in the infantile unconscious, but in the previous day’s preoccupations, besides often dragging in associated material from other ages since infancy; or perhaps more properly put, such earlier post-infantile material often linked up with the main dream thought, whether to help disguise it or just to get in on the act. This awkward disconnect between theory and reality may be why he mostly confined his specimen dream analyses in The Interpretation of Dreams to their latent contents drawn from the dreamer’s previous day’s experience. He nonetheless insisted dogmatically until near the end of his days on the infantile source of all dreams, and even in rescinding that infantile edge in extremis in his unfinished Outline of Psychoanalysis through the even-handed formulation: “dreams from the ego or from the id” (Freud, Werke, XVII, p. 88), he retained the formula that dreams are wish fulfillments, which of itself lent the infantile component a manner of overweight as the source of those wishes that the dream represented as fulfilled.

So comparably as of the late 1890s did he see the infantile source of neuroses as determinative and the “precipitating event” as merely accessory (despite some telltale concessions in particular cases). Aligning neuroses with dreams for a change, he declared hysterical, and probably all neurotic, symptoms to be wish fulfillments, which was easier to see for an innkeeper’s daughter gasping over forbidden sex than for an aspirant singer choking on old hates. And in practice he himself mostly supplied the infantile component of dreams as of neuroses with or without the dreamer’s or patient’s acquiescence. An egregious instance of such imposed interpreting is the prime object lesson on how dreams work that he gave in his closing course of university lectures

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of 1915-1917. There the dreamer saw herself with her husband in a half-empty theater after having rushed to buy tickets at what proved to be too high a price. The latent dream thought from the day before, which the dreamer readily conceded, was that she had made a bad bargain by rushing into marriage, symbolized by being in the theater. Years later Freud supplied the infantile wish shown in the dream as gratified: to see what goes on in marriage. But as Stephen Kern put it: “Infants do not wish to see what goes on in marriage. Perhaps children do” (Stephen Kern, private communication). In any case it was no insistence by dreamers, but the architectonics of Freud’s dream theory in sync with his theory of neurosis, that mandated an infantile wish fulfilled by every dream.

With his requirement of an infantile original for every neurosis, the theorist Freud painted the therapist into a corner. The hunt for infantile underpinnings of neuroses was perforce futile where the symptoms were fluid, as with his patient who kept literalizing the likes of a piercing gaze, or again with committed neurotics like the Wolf Man, half persuaded by Freud after over four years of analysis that his neurotic trouble came at age one-and-a-half from a traumatic peep at parental intercourse performed a tergo three times running: pronounced cured by Freud in 1914, he spent his remaining 65 years generating ever-new symptoms, only to wind up calling psychoanalysis the bunk. And with self-made as against born neurotics, what need was there for an Ur-neurosis to explain the depressive fit of a 14-year-old on learning that she had an imperforate hymen? The hunt for such an infantile original would only have provided a therapeutic distraction in his practice of the 1890s. As late as his last university lectures he conceded the point implicitly, by a sort of Freudian slip, in regard to a wife’s compulsive ritual of summoning her maid on one pretext or another while standing beside a soiled tablecloth: there was no need to re-

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cur to childhood in this case, he told his students, since the symptom threw back no farther than to her wedding night, when her husband had stained their bed sheets with red ink lest the maid notice that he had proved impotent. Besides, in none of the cases he reported in the 1890s did the post-infantile traumas he then identified as “operative” fail to explain the symptoms: all were neat fits. And were the cures he then claimed unreal? Of his twelve sufficient case reports in Studies in Hysteria, two were stated cures, another four presumable cures, and a further two possible cures. As late as January, 1899, he claimed to Fliess to have cured a hysterical melancholia acquired from a trauma at age 14, and this with no mention of a recourse to earlier childhood. True, in 1914 he pronounced his perennial patient the Wolf Man cured who in fact had a veritable lifetime of neurotic relapse ahead of him. But that false cure, which turned on a suppositional “primal scene” (Freud, Werke, I, p. 226), only highlights by contrast his conclusion to his case history of the patient who had come to him in 1893 with crippling leg pains brought on by her disavowed feeling of being trapped in life: within months he rejoiced to see her dancing away at a house party, then to learn of her love-marriage shortly afterwards.

Conversely, his 1890s concept of summation, whereby it took a “precipitating event” at the end of the line to catalyze a whole run of traumatic precedents and distill symptoms out of them, made no provision for an “operative” infantile trauma even where exceptionally there was one. He might, though, ignore this last-straw concept in practice at the time, as when he nicely derived a woman’s compulsive idea that her sewing class mustn’t end yet, that she wasn’t done yet, from her grandmother’s harsh strictures against her leaving the potty before her business there was finished. On Freud’s couch in the 1890s, infantile originals were rightly reserved for symptoms acquired in infancy.

In sum, Freud’s psychoanalytical rule of a childhood

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original for every adult symptom or neurosis brought him only mixed theoretical and therapeutic gain. On the down side in particular—and this is the central point at issue here—it ruled out traumatic reliving, in which an unprecedented, shattering experience is re-experienced close to the bone in all its haunting specificity. That re-experience might be chronic, as with nagging memories or transparent nightmares constituting a so-called traumatic neurosis, nicknamed shell shock in World War I and its aftermath.

In his late, unfinished Outline of Psychoanalysis Freud reiterated his standing ground rule of neurotic origination—”in every case the later neurotic illness links up with the prelude in childhood”—only to add this time: “The so-called traumatic neuroses (due to excessive fright or severe somatic shocks…) may be an exception; their connection to determinants in childhood has so far eluded detection” (Freud, Werke, XVII, p. 111). True, he canceled this nominal concession by tacking on the implication that those childhood determinants were no less real for being elusive, but no matter: he was not hot on their trail. A still bigger casualty of his theorem of the infantile neurotic precedent than the traumatic neurosis was episodic traumatic reliving such as makes history. For the trauma that gets relived episodically, as a full-length event, is a trauma properly so-called that in almost every case strikes out of the blue like a sudden blow on the head (as it does literally in Pirandello’s paradigmatic Henry IV). When it strikes that way, it strikes with no lead time for anxiety, as Freud later stressed, but above all with no precedents to help its victim cope. To be sure, it may link up with earlier upsets as it strains for precedents in the course of the reliving, but that is something else.

In 1914 Freud coined the term “repetition compulsion” (Wiederholungszwang) to cover patients in analysis acting out feelings or attitudes from their infancy that were never clearly conscious: such, he astutely observed, was their

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way of remembering (Freud, Werke, X, pp. 129-130). The term “repetition compulsion” carries a deceptive ring of affinity with episodic traumatic reliving, from which, however, such acting out differs radically in at least three ways: it is elicited by the analysis rather than contrived spontaneously; it reproduces a diffuse cluster of inchoate relations to the surrounding world rather than a single, structured traumatic event; above all, in episodic reliving as a rule not the trauma itself, but only its reliving, is unconscious.

In 1920 Freud re-launched the “repetition compulsion” in the new guise of an instinctive losing effort by the human organism to inure itself to excessive stimuli (Freud, Werke, XIII, pp. 17-22). He observed this tendency at work first in his baby grandson repeatedly tossing away and pulling back a toy held by a string, then in the recurrent stark memories that characterize a traumatic neurosis, only to wind up inferring from it a death drive inherent in all life—none of which even began to approach episodic traumatic reliving. By contrast, what more than approached episodic traumatic reliving was when his first hypnotic patient repeated his treatment of her serially with other doctors, symptoms inclusive, beginning a few years after she left his care—or so he learned in 1924, noting: “It was the true ‘repetition compulsion’” (Freud, Werke, I, pp. 162n), which to my mischievous mind suggests that he saw the “true ‘repetition compulsion’” in episodic as against chronic reliving (besides allowing that his failed cure was traumatic) even while now distancing himself from the dubious concept by the use of quotation marks.

Why should the victim of a painful trauma keep remembering it? Freud’s best answer was: in order to be thrown by it less. A trauma hits too fast to arouse anxiety, he argued; anxiety tags after a trauma when the trauma hits but then precedes the trauma when it is remembered; thanks to this latter “signal anxiety,” its victim braces for it in remem-

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brance and thereby dulls its impact (Freud, Werke, XIII, pp. 31-32; XIV, pp. 199-200; XV, pp. 100-101; XVII, p. 130). On this construction, all hurtful traumas would arouse anxiety. In fact, however, some elicit only other affects—shame, disgust, compassion, disaffection, disenchantment, whatever. More to the point, Freud’s tacit premise was that traumas hurt even when they are off the mind, or else why remember them in order to dull their impact? Not that they hurt unconsciously; there is no unconscious hurting; what hurts is off the mind, not the hurting itself. But Freud stressed the conscious over the unconscious in traumatic shock: the ego, caught off guard by a trauma, seeks to gain control over it. His tacit premise alone holds: traumas do go on hurting even when they are off the mind.

For the rest, if a trauma has aroused anxiety, anxiety will precede it in memory only insofar as the memory is expected to be traumatic, in which case it is the remembered trauma that brings on the anxiety after all. Or more simply put, anxiety doesn’t signal a trauma if remembering the trauma is what arouses the anxiety. As for such niceties as whether the pain of remembering a trauma is the old pain resurfacing or a new one, he never addressed them. His best explanation for repeating a trauma, transposed from remembering a trauma, would logically have been likewise: to gain control over it. But a trauma is not itself controlled in being replayed; what is controlled is only the form of the replay. Traumatic reliving was just not Freud’s forte after 1900.

By way of explaining the castration complex that he saw as endemic to infantile psychosexuality, Freud postulated an archaic inborn memory trace of a castrating tribal father of yore traumatically gang-murdered by a band of his sons who then relived their grave deed ritually in a totemic ceremony prefiguring all future religious observance. This conception of a collective analogue to an individual obsessional neurosis fed into the historical fantasy of Freud’s last

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years whereby the Jews of the Exodus murdered Moses in re-enactment of the age-old murder of the fabled tribal father, whereupon a couple of millenniums later the Jews of Judea in turn had Jesus crucified in re-enactment of the murder of Moses. With this grandiose conception of a collective re-enactment of two world-historical mass traumas by turns at countless generations’ remove in each case, Freud made ample figurative (not to say fanciful) amends for his exclusion of episodic traumatic reliving from his psychoanalytical framework and, correspondingly, from a theoretical passage on traumatic reliving in that selfsame work on Moses. (Freud, Werke, pp. 180-181.)

Now to sum up. In Freud’s traumatic theory of the 1890s, neurosis was a chronic reliving of traumas loosely defined. In his later, stricter usage, the chronic reliving of a trauma proper, or lasting massive upset, was a special kind of neurosis: the traumatic neurosis. He pointed the way to understanding episodic as well as chronic reliving when he showed in the 1890s that all neurotic symptoms were relivings. But then he blocked the traumatic neurosis, or chronic reliving of a trauma proper, out of his psychoanalytical system when he adopted the rule of an infantile original behind every neurosis, for the distinctive feature of true-blue traumas is that they have no originals. Episodic reliving for its part had no access to his system by the same token and, further, in that it was not neurotic. Not being neurotic, it never entered his consulting room, so that he never dealt with it clinically. Yet his decipherment of symptomatic behavior as remembrance in action was precisely suited to make sense of episodic traumatic reliving.

As a phrase, the “repetition compulsion” that he postulated in 1914 and redefined in 1920 might have seemed to denote, or at least to cover, episodic traumatic reliving, but as a mechanism it was unrelated and even incompatible. Late in his life, in spite of his psychoanalytic schema inhospitable to

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episodic traumatic reliving, Freud fantasized a massive case of it extending from the hypothesized murder of a primeval tribal father (itself relived symptomatically meanwhile as totemic ritual) through the supposed murder of Moses to the real crucifixion of Christ. The psychohistorian’s task is to replace such pseudohistory by history with the same Freudian aim of uncovering its inner workings.

[Editor’s Note: We wish to thank the Karnac Press in London for permission to use this chapter of Rudolph Binion’s Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film (forthcoming in September 2010) as a basis for this symposium. Two other parts of this book appearing first in Clio’s Psyche in 2005: “Bismarck’s Alliance Nightmare” (XII, pp. 25-26) and the symposium article “De Gaulle as Pétain” (XII, pp. 37, 56-66, followed by historians’ comments and Binion’s response, pp. 66-100).]

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