Freud and the Disappearing of Historical Trauma

Binion focuses on the difference between trauma proper and reliving in the form of “a full-scale performance” out of the blue, versus “a diffuse cluster of inchoate relations to the surrounding world” originating in childhood, endlessly

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reproduced in the form of neurotic symptoms. He traces Freud’s difficulties in sorting out the two and his imputing of a common origin to both in childhood experience, a decision, Binion argues, based on theory, not data. When trauma strikes in adulthood, this sets clinician and patient on a path to finding a nonexistent past. Interest in adult life in the contemporary world gives way to preoccupation with childhood, interest in the importance of one’s actual early life yielding to preoccupation with a theoretical past, patients pressed to redirect their focus from the life they’ve actually lived to a mental place apart, a move that might be called dissociative. Similarly, positing a killing of Moses as a replay of a primal horde’s killing of its leader, with the killing of Jesus a replay of the killing of Moses, involves turning from close observation of contemporary adult historical reality to a theoretically imagined past. Both involve a disappearing of actual life in favor of a world that existed only in Freud’s mind.

This contrasts with current research studying trauma proper in adult life and its sequellae, Lenore Terr’s systematic, observational studies of real children in the wake of real traumas, work she describes as “the psychology of external reality,” and observational studies of the “inchoate relations” of infants/children with their mothers, exploring what in those relations becomes the fabric of a “good” life or the fabric of endlessly repeated distress. Freud attempted the “reconstruction” in these realms of conflicts that existed because theorizing said they must. Without today’s research to turn to, he was left with little to do but theorize when observation left blanks he could not fill in.

On the other hand, perhaps Freud’s refusal to take behavior and “reality” at face value can be read as an insistence that a self of perception, feeling, and intention lies within our actions if we but do the work of discovering and thereby becoming that self. His theorizing opened the door to today’s inquiry into the role of childhood in learning to be

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such a self. His practice, however flawed, was a practice that could be seen as transforming selves-locked-in-actions into selves possessing self-reflection, selves knowing the difference between motivation and behavior, selves on a journey to a deeper empathy.

Confronted by World War I, Freud wrestled with the horror of hatreds strong enough to kill 16 million people, while faced in his consulting room by feelings strong enough to sabotage adult lives. His “death instinct” has the hallmark of a theory framed where no research yet existed, but strange as “thanatos” was, it was angled in a right direction. Neurobiological and primate research suggest death-centered instincts lurking on each side of the predator-prey encounter: fight, flight, and freezing to avoid death, predatory instincts for hunting seeking to inflict it. Though his work fell short of what we now know, he persisted in asking a question we have yet to answer: how the existence of a self-within-our-actions might shed light on why humanness so often turns destructive.

So why the repetition in both traumatic reliving and in the symptoms of “neurosis?” What is to be made of Freud’s pursuit of “development” as somehow implicated in both? Perhaps again he opened a path to thinking about something he himself could not quite identify. How to do humanness well together, rather than poorly, is something we have to discover. When trauma or neurotic symptoms repeat, it suggests some way of doing humanity remains in need of discovering—or needs to be restored after being shattered—two very different situations. An attempt to discover what the better way might be still in the offing must continue until the better way is consciously understood, named, breathed into, and loved enough to be given its rightful place in real life or restored after being shattered.

The most important project driving repetition is to get

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a way of being human up and running rightly when we don’t know what rightly is, instead knowing “wrongly” as the fabric of being. Or, having found the good and the right established, we repeat because the disaster of having it shattered has not been acknowledged, or an understanding large enough to encompass both the right and its destruction forged, an understanding that rehabilitates the right and the good within recognition that wrong can at times overwhelm the labors of love, reason, and devotion to real life.

Freud’s push into the territory of early development can be read as a push into the larger question of what it means to do humanness well, a breaking-down of that large issue into its micro-ingredients as imagined through the vehicle of early developmental stages. But particular good ways of being human emerge at different points in our lives, some in infancy, others in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. He got the framework wrong but the endeavor right. Still “the need to set the good in motion” glosses over the large differences between that challenge as found in traumatic re-enacting, where what was established was shattered, and fabric-of-life memory, which is what we are when the good was never experienced.

For me, Binion’s challenging, illuminating chapter prompted these reflections and an eagerness to see how these themes are played out in his forthcoming book as he takes them into the historical dimension that Freud found so problematic.

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