After the Event

Abstract

How individuals and societies cope with the aftermath of events which they experienced as traumatic has attracted ever-increasing academic and media attention in ‘Western society’s ongoing obsession with catastrophe, victimization, and memorialization’.1 Within trauma theory it has become commonplace to emphasise the temporal structure of post-traumatic psychopathology: ‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly’.2 The sudden irruption of an unanticipatable, threatening situation necessarily finds the individual unprepared, inducing fear, helplessness and bewilderment. Immediate defence mechanisms may include dissociative symptoms such as numbing, detachment, derealisation or depersonalisation. Subsequently, dissociation or repression may lead to amnesia and/or conversion disorders (such as psychogenic paralyses and anaesthesia), or, conversely, to intrusive memories.3 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud attributed traumatic neurosis to an extensive breach in the mind’s protective shield against stimuli; hence, dreams in which the traumatic situation is compulsively repeated attempt ‘to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis’, thus permitting it to be grasped affectively and cognitively.4