Too Much, Too Soon: Trauma and Its Transformations
The Problem
Trauma is different for each individual. Typically, trauma is assumed to be an event or circumstance resulting in physical, emotional, and/or life-threatening harm (Trauma and violence, 2022). However, what hurts one may not hurt another. Each perceives and responds to trauma differently, and it can affect individuals, families, and communities. A “traumatic” event may be viewed as perfectly reasonable by some and unreasonable, insane, or beyond comprehension by others. Likewise, the same event may “traumatize” some people but not others. Further, the onset of the effects may be rapid and various, or they may not appear for many years after the precipitating event.
For many, trauma is part of a narrative, a fiction of reality which gives the event (and most importantly oneself) a meaningful history; thus, trauma may also be politicized, constitutive, and foundational (Chapman, 2022b). This subjective and essentially novel quality of traumatic experience, that is, our total perception of trauma, it seems, extends to the nature of all disasters, crises, trauma, and their transformations. Essentially mediated through the individual subject, or more simply, by one’s very own perceptions and sensations, apperception, a traumatic event is experienced and transformed into a body of symptoms which take the shape of traditionally disruptive and distressing memories, thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors. (Note: In this sense, a “flashback” is a kind of sensory haunt.) Briefly, at the subjective and psychological level, to investigate the nature of trauma is to re-view the original “site of damage,” and in doing so to analyze or explicate its cause(s) and its effect(s). Put simply, we ask: What is (the) trauma, and how does it affect us?
To state clearly the primary purpose of this essay, it is to investigate these questions and identify how trauma (i.e., crisis, disaster, disruption, disturbance, etc.) results in disorder. In short, how does trauma lead to trouble?
What Is Trauma?
For the intent of this essay, there are two dominant discourses of the origins and effects of trauma in relation to psychological well-being. The most common and widely applied is the mental health model which supposes that (psychological) trauma is caused by an individual’s experience of certain events which they are unable to process, understand, or make sense of within their immediate, present(ing) context. It refers to something “outside the range of human experience” that would be “markedly distressing” to almost anyone (DSM-5-TR, 2022). In Existential Psychotherapy, Yalom (1980) claims: “too much, too soon” is the basic recipe for trauma (p. 104). Experientially, and perhaps intuitively so, this seems true. In typical treatment settings, it is this intense disruption (“too much, too soon”) of experience that requires an application of understanding, sense-making, and processing in order to “de-traumatize” the event and subject “through the establishment of meaning (Chapman, 2022a). This is where the mental health model functions—at the very surface of the event “outside the range of human experience.”
Trauma itself, then, is characterized by meaninglessness, a lack of sense. Yet, paradoxically, research suggests that trauma plays a critical (read: necessary, requisite) role in the very genesis of deeply entrenched schemas and psychological pathologies, and further, the proximity of the subject to the “perpetrator” of trauma (such as a primary caregiver or a local environmental disaster) regulates the intensity and course of the trauma’s developmental effects (Curnow, 2007; Fonagy et al., 2018). In other words, the traumatic event reflects itself in the form of symptoms within the subject.
The mental health model, along with the entire industry which supports it, suggests that one creates or finds meaning in the otherwise meaningless, unreasonable trauma. Pre-existing narratives are re-written or entirely new narratives are created within which the trauma is de-traumatized. Replace unhealthy coping mechanisms with healthier, normalized coping mechanisms. The mental health model claims “trauma no longer has to be feared because it can be explained—and it can be managed” (Chapman, 2022a). This is the reasoning behind basic talk-therapy, that is, putting words to feelings in a brave space. By verbalizing experience we give ourselves a kind of distance from it, space to heal, re-organize, and grow.
What is trauma? One answer: Something unexplained, later (often with great effort and time) explained. Trauma causes trouble because it is (initially and primarily) disruptive, without sense. The mental health model (and its production of a meaningful trauma narrative) may provide sufficient sense and meaning for society, communities, and individuals. We may indeed be able to re-write the past. Something remains. This is not the whole story of trauma and its (dis)contents.
Trauma Explained?
As Nietsche knew, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” The second and less widely understood discourse of trauma is the psychoanalytic model. In psychoanalytic theory, in order to sufficiently explain trauma, we need to attempt to understand that which is fundamentally beyond understanding. Psychoanalysis differs from the mental health model by offering us a deeper, more obscure perspective to the workings and manifestations of trauma. In this view, no sense or meaning can be made of real trauma because trauma itself extends beyond what is possible to be sensed and reasoned. In other words, we can explain trauma, but trauma can never truly be explained.
Trauma, on its surface, is an unexplainable event. However, what constitutes trauma is not, as it appears, merely the precipitation of the event of disturbance itself, but also and at the same time the return of the event as disturbance, that is, as presenting, precipitating symptoms which effectively (and repetitively) traumatize said event. In Lacanian terms, trauma is an “eruption of the Real” and its symptoms constitute the “return of the repressed” (Lacan, 1998). To summarize: trauma is simultaneously (1) the precipitation of the event (dubbed retroactively as traumatic) and (2) the reflection or repetition of affect(s) within the experiential subject (dubbed presently as symptoms).
Trauma may also take the shape of a kind of psycho, social, or physical break, delusion, seizure, or fit. For many who consider the problem of trauma, it is difficult to ignore the roots of the idea, namely, its extension from the Greek word meaning “wound.” (Also, the psychoanalysts remind us, it is cognate with the German word for dream, reflecting trauma’s relationship to ideas of illusion, unreality, and fiction.) Freud, in his paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), argues that “We may, I think, tentatively venture to regard the common traumatic neurosis as a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli” (p. 31, emphasis mine). Yalom’s aforementioned recipe (“too much, too soon”) echoes this very notion. Freud says, “We describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield… Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defensive measure. At the same time, the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action” (Freud, 1920, p. 29, emphasis mine). In the midst of a traumatic event, research and experiential evidence shows “there is an initial breakdown when the protective shield is breached by trauma, and there may be a catastrophic disruption of functioning. There is a sense that death is imminant, or that one is threatened by total annihilation of the self. The victim is often shocked and confused, perhaps unable to take in what has happened” (Curnow, 2007). We might say a traumatized person is psychologically wounded—not only in the experience of the primary event but concurrently as the ongoing process of “traumatization” wherein the event returns as the repressed in the form of disruptive symptoms.
The psychoanalytic model posits trauma as foundational to the human subject precisely because it affords us a cause for resistance; and it is from this development and emergence of our resistances, our psychological defenses, that our ego and life are given shape and intensity. While the mental health model (which includes psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapies, and other talk-therapies) offers us a process of forming meaning from meaninglessness, the psychoanalytic model offers something less potent but more explanatory. The trauma narrative of psychoanalysis is one of (re)generation and (re)production. In the moment of the event, “the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action.” Nothing is satisfied in the “original trauma,” and everything—in the moment of the event—is lacking. Enter the mental health model’s narratives to attempt to cover this gap, applying temporary dressing to a life-long wound. The problem is greater than we suppose, in fact, greater than we can suppose. Regeneration (via filiation) and reproduction (via affinity) are essential means by which individuals, communities, and societies evolve and grow through trauma.
The “original trauma,” at least for Lacan, is the lack of sense found fundamentally in the production of jouissance, that is, libidinal enjoyment. And for Lacan, it is ultimately capitalism which “is a regime that hinges on a lack of libidinal enjoyment” (Declercq, 2006). From this viewpoint, capitalism’s goal, that is, the production of jouissance, is itself a kind of production (or at least facilitation of the production) of trauma, leaving us (individuals and society) with merely a means of coping or bearing through the experiences of recurring traumas, perpetually drawn to create meaning from that which is effectively without meaning. We can explain and create our own meaning, but in the end this is not enough to be finally satisfied. Death, as a force that warps and weakens us, is the ultimate endpoint of satisfaction. One need only consider social and economic examples such as addiction, violence, poverty, sickness, homelessness, and other afflictions that haunt us in order to glimpse the depth to which capitalism (and the structures that produce it) produce and/or facilitate trauma in the form of psychological, economic, social, and political affects.
What Now?
Trauma happens, and then we tell stories to re-view what happened. The mental health model supports this process and encourages people to create meaning where there is little or none. Meaning (or the making of meaning) works to de-traumatize the events and victims of trauma. A new, normalized, healthy narrative incorporates the trauma as something explainable and thus manageable. Differing from this view, the psychoanalytic model expresses a deeper, more immediate reality of trauma in which all events are in some way potentially traumatic (or traumatizable, we might say). The only “effective” trauma narrative in psychoanalysis is the meta-narrative of trauma itself. Under capitalism, for example, trauma is produced and rationalized as a feature of its very development and proliferation of production. Ecopsychologists argue that “the very conception, invention, development, and deployment of new technologies involves a highly undemocratic social process that is rationalized as ‘progress’” (Glendinning, 1995, p. 49). The world, in other words, is repeatedly traumatized, and we learn to forget that fact. “Our experience in mass technological society is indeed ‘outside the range of human experience,’ and by the evidence of psychological distress, ecological destruction, and technological control, this way of life has been ‘markedly distressing’ to almost everyone” (Glendinning, 1995, p. 52). Trauma’s slogan: Apocalypse now. Trauma is not simply an event or array of disruptive symptoms, but a continuous and unraveling process of novel formations and information. Our ability to grasp its meaning appears limited, and trauma is, in many ways, inevitable in our world today. No one goes through life without trouble. And though it may be terribly distressing, we are—despite all odds—managing together.
Works Cited
Chapman, L. (2022a, January 20). The two discourses of trauma. Touching the Real. https://therapeia.org.uk/ttr/2022/01/20/the-two-discourses-of-trauma/
Chapman, L. (2022b, January 28). Three types of trauma?. Touching the Real. https://therapeia.org.uk/ttr/2022/01/28/three-types-of-trauma/
Curnow, R. (2007). Trauma: A psychoanalytic perspective. aipsych.org.
Declercq, F. (2006). Lacan on the capitalist discourse: its consequences for libidinal enjoyment and social bonds. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 11, 74-83.
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5-TR. (2022). American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., & Jurist, E. L. (Eds.). (2018). Affect regulation, mentalization and the development of the self. Routledge.
Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Beyond the pleasure principle; Group Psychology: And other works: (1920-1922) (Vol. XVIII, pp. 3–64). essay, Hogarth press.
Glendinning, C. (1995). Technology, trauma, and the wild. Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind, 41-54.
Lacan, J. (1998). Four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. WW Norton & Company.
Trauma and violence. SAMHSA. (2022, September 27). https://www.samhsa.gov/trauma-violence
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.
