Il trauma: storia di un concetto e del suo significato

Abstract

History teaches us that human beings have always suffered from violent irruptions in their psyche and that this irruption has lasting effects, as perturbation of dreams. During the last two centuries, the concepts of traumatic neurosis and war neurosis were pointed out; then, in the last decades, these concepts’ definition has been challenged for reasons of psychoanalytic resonance, and the American DSM proposed to replace them with the new concept of posttraumatic stress state. However, it has been pointed out that not all the clinical cases observed from then on after a trauma have evolved in a traumatic neurosis. In the light of these remarks, and going against the tide, the francophone school introduced the use of the generic denomination post-traumatic syndrome . It has the merit of stating explicitly the psychological nature of the trauma and it can cover all the stages of traumatic pathology: the immediate, the post-immediate, and the chronic. Moreover, among the cases of the latter kind, it allows to understand well also the cases structured as traumatic neurosis, which fit well into the limiting criteria of PTSD, as well as all the other cases which are atypical or not clearly classifiable.

Keywords

• trauma
• stress
• DSM
• scare
• francophone approach