Psychoanalysis and Trauma

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. The course will start at 13:30pm and end at 17:00pm on both days and includes a tea break. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 3 months.

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“Trauma is a universal human experience. While each person responds differently to trauma, its presence in our lives nonetheless marks a continual thread through human history and pre-history…”

The first half of this course will examine the late 19th century revolution in psychology that created the beginnings of our current understanding of trauma. We will explore the contributions of Charcot, Janet, Breuer and (the early) Freud to our understanding of traumatic experience and its role in the causation of hysteria, and the neuroses in general.

As is well known, Freud repudiated the traumatic model of the genesis of the neuroses as his thinking developed and psychoanalysis began to take on its classical ‘Freudian’ form. In his mature theory he insisted on the primacy of internal factors – factors in the patient’s inner world, such as infantile sexual wishes – as the true source the neuroses.

This theory was severely tested by the epidemic of psychosomatic disorders (‘shell shock’) produced by the conditions of the Great War. Nevertheless, Freud insisted on maintaining his view that neurosis was exclusively caused by factors in the patient’s internal world – and, in 1920, he managed to persuade his closest collaborators to support him in this.

In the end, however, Freud could only delay the recognition of the importance of traumatic stress – that is to say, of external shock, and adverse environmental factors – in shaping the psychology of the individual. But - though the weight of his authority in psychiatry in the mid twentieth century – he did delay this quite significantly.

It was only through work with traumatised veterans of the Vietnam War that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was finally established as an official diagnosis in 1980. But since then, the understanding of trauma and of its effects, of the many forms it can take, and the development of methods of treatment, has become central to contemporary psychotherapy.

In the second half of the course, we will examine the current understanding of ‘Complex Trauma’, and see how, in the last thirty years, trauma has been finally re-integrated into a broader, contemporary version of psychoanalysis, in which both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ factors are given their due.

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Speaker:

Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.

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Tickets: £ 45

Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.

A limited number of £20 bursary tickets will be available for those unable to pay the full amount. Please email perry@freud.org.uk to apply for a bursary.