The Unthinkable: Representation and the Encounter With Trauma

Abstract

The author explores the notion of representation and trauma, taking into account their negative manifestation in the mind, as memories without representation. In the face of massive trauma, the mind deploys dissociative mechanisms, so the experience remains unrepresented. Psychoanalytic technique has to expand its scope in order to meet-create these unrepresented forms. Alongside our classic technique, the analyst needs to work in a particular way—one that involves a regressive state to preverbal, or even prerepresentational areas within the analyst, allowing him or her to gain access to the traumatic zones. The integration of the trauma into the systems of representations depends on the possibility of the analyst to submit to a process of regression so as to offer a substrate on which hitherto unformed experience may assume form and become represented.