Binion’s Reliving

Dr. Binion’s paper “Reliving with Freud” is one chapter of his forthcoming book, Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film, in which he gives us a wonderfully detailed account of the history and development of Freud’s thinking on the relationship between trauma and psychological symptoms. The chapter centers on Binion’s concept of “episodic traumatic reliving.” Two quotes from the paper tell us what he means by this concept. The first is, “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” (p. 1) and secondly traumatic reliving is, “…an unprecedented shattering experience…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 dramatic neurosis, nicknamed shell shock in World War I and its aftermath” (p. 12). In his previous work, particularly his 2005 book, Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History, Binion has used this concept of traumatic reliving to characterize events at the large group level, for example, in exploring the role it played in the activities of the Third Reich. This paper is focused on the individual. His description of traumatic reliving sounds, particularly when he equates it with “shell shock,” like he is talking about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the symptoms of which can include nightmares and flashbacks including literal reappearances of elements of the past traumatic event.

I would suggest that Binion is being too restrictive in his characterization of episodic traumatic reliving in the individual. Although symptoms of PTSD can include flashbacks in which the trauma is “re-experienced close to the bone in

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all its haunting specificity,” there are many other symptoms which can be appropriately described as reliving or reenactment that don’t necessarily involve a literal representation of the traumatic events. For example, consider a soldier who participated in a wartime atrocity. He might well have flashbacks in which he literally relives the traumatic experience but he might also engage in periodic self-destructive behavior, which might stem from his guilt about participating in the atrocity. These self-destructive behaviors are also a form of reliving and reenactment that can be seen as repetitive attempts at mastery just as much as flashbacks and nightmares are.

Binion cogently argues that PTSD flashbacks are not what Freud was talking about in his 1914 paper, Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through, where he introduces the term “repetition compulsion.” This paper is subtitled Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis, and in it Freud limits his discussion of the repetition compulsion to events that occur in psychoanalytic treatment. However, Freud, in answering the question of what it is that the patient is repeating, says, “…everything that has made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality—his inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes and his pathological character traits” (Standard Edition, Vol. 12, p. 151). In other words, what is repeated is a lot more than replays or memories of previous trauma. It includes repeating the entire range of responses, including the various defenses and compromise formations the person has developed in reaction to traumatic experiences.

Binion correctly states, when he reviews some of Freud’s earlier “pre-psychoanalytic” work, that Freud was aware of the existence of PTSD—he saw PTSD-like symptoms in his patients and emphasized the etiological importance of trauma for understanding symptoms. The abandonment of the “seduction theory,” starting in 1897, led to a psy-

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chology that applied to more than those who had experienced a severe external trauma. The notion of what could be traumatic was broadened to include deprivation as well as impingement. The role of imagination in interpreting, reacting, and even creating a traumatic experience was recognized. For the post-1897 Freud to understand a person’s current difficulties, he had to know not only about the trauma, but also about how the person reacted to it.

As Binion points out at the end of his paper, starting in 1920 with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud broadened the concept of the repetition compulsion and saw it as common to all individuals, not just patients in psychoanalytic treatment. Freud also used it to describe large group events such as his speculations concerning the sons’ murdering of the father in the primal horde in Totem and Taboo and the alleged murders of Moses and Jesus from Moses and Monotheism.

Freud and Binion, along with many psychohistorians, are in agreement when it comes to looking at large group behavior. They all fully recognize the power and pervasiveness of the repetition compulsion along with the significance of the return of the repressed, which fuels the reliving and re-enacting of earlier trauma experienced by the group.

Although understanding how the repetition compulsion, reliving, and reenacting operate within an individual provides a model and metaphors that are clearly relevant to the psychohistorical understanding of broad historical and cultural events, the study of large group phenomena using psychoanalytic principles is the main subject matter of psychohistory. It has also been the focus of much of Binion’s previous psychohistorical work. I think that the existence of episodic traumatic reliving, on the large group level, is indisputable. It is an extremely helpful concept for understanding the motivation behind much of history.

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On the individual level I think the concept, as Binion uses it, is far too narrow to be useful as part of a psychohistorical explanation. It applies to those who have experienced a severe trauma and have developed PTSD. Freud’s use of the repetition compulsion to apply to a wider range of both “symptomatic” behavior and to a larger group than those who suffer from PTSD, ultimately to all of us, is of greater utility to psychohistorians. It also is in closer agreement to Binion’s previous characterization of traumatic reliving when he says, “Whatever we do we tend to act out our past.”

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