We Are All Reliving with Freud

Professor Binion is convincingly trying to move his paper towards several important conclusions, one being that Freudian terminology tends to mask some overlapping concepts that may offer or infer interpretations that are misleading when one is trying to grasp the development of Freud’s traumatic memory theories. If Dr. Binion is correct, Freud

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tended to theorize in incremental parts, as if one kind of reliving was distinct from another, or that all trauma dealt with in psychoanalysis had to have an infantile original, and could not be episodic or in flux. No doubt that episodic memory was always staring Freud right in the face—through the early days of conversion theory, when “mnemonic symbols” or physical metaphors for the suppressed trauma, which Freud then concluded was always associated with a sexual experience, through the seduction theory (which Binion calls “ill-conceived”), and his controversial redaction of it into psychoanalysis proper, the Oedipal Complex, drive theory, and beyond, to the topic of Binion’s paper, episodic and chronic reliving. He shows how Freud boxes himself in with his own overlabored taxonomy, overlooking the general and the obvious.

Throughout “Reliving with Freud,” Rudolph Binion takes a psychohistorian’s approach to understanding Freud. He points out how Freud first believed the original trauma occurred in a fugue state, that it could not be “relived” without some precipitating event in the present triggering it, Freud himself admitted in “Aetiology of Hysteria,” that “the patients know nothing about these scenes.” Their memories of sexual abuse appear to have been responses to Freud’s hints, suggestions, and persuasion, and Freud apparently indicated that prior to therapy, the patient’s knowledge of trauma is incomplete and expressed in a highly summary form as an incomplete trauma narrative. However, Binion is more interested in the phenomenon of traumatic memory—how it fits together as a puzzle and how it manifests itself through time, or rather how it becomes timeless in quality and not arranged chronologically, so that it seems to belong to the unconscious.

It is in the second half of the paper that Binion suggests that there are two kinds of reliving trauma because episodic reliving strikes out of the blue; it is always “off the

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mind” and unassimilated. The only assimilation possible is into the doctor’s story, rather than the patient’s, as both are “reliving.” The Professor suggests that Freud often saw what he wanted to see—although he was frequently faced with empirical evidence that went counter to his claims. By showing us the chinks in Freud’s thinking, Binion prepares us to be more skeptical about this late reasoning regarding traumatic experience whether episodic (true blue traumas) or chronic, and the implicit paradox of reliving painful experiences in order to do away with them. Binion does not seem to agree with the idea that repetition compulsion is a way of mastering trauma, or has any link to “reliving.” The repetition compulsion engages behavior that mimics an earlier stressor, either deliberately or unconsciously. In the fort/da game, which Freud interpreted, a toddler’s mastery over trauma is achieved by a controlled staging that reenacts the original trauma within a ritualized space helping the child to regulate his anxiety about loss and separation from his mother. But as Binion points out, the compulsion to repeat painful experiences does not address episodic reliving, such as the type of shell shock suffered by World War I veterans.

He ends his paper with a discussion of the castration complex, which Freud saw as endemic to infantile sexuality. On the last page, Binion sums up his article by giving us an example of Freud’s episodic “reliving” which he viewed as universal and innate to all human development. Thus we are all reliving “with Freud.”

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