Traumatic Neurosis Revisited eBook

In doing so, it offers a challenge to key assumptions underpinning the dominant discourse of trauma, which is exemplified in what the author terms ‘the PTSD paradigm’. In particular it challenges the idea that trauma is something that simply ‘happens’ to human beings and that its effects that can be eradicated through the construction of various forms of trauma narrative, for example, in psychotherapy and different types of collective histories. In the development of this argument the author also draws on the work of Jean Laplanche, which has previously been under-utilised in mainstream Lacanian theory and practice.

This book sheds new light on the relationship between the traumatic effects of the signifier and the impact of the ‘external’ world. It will be of interest to practitioners, as well as to students and scholars of psychoanalysis and philosophy.