Trauma (psychology)

“ Moreover, on further investigation it became quite obvious that even a trauma which had actually occurred was not always responsible for the whole of the neurosis, although it does sometimes look as if the structure of the neurosis depended entirely upon the trauma. If a neurosis were the inevitable consequence of a trauma it would be quite incomprehensible why neurotics are not incomparably more numerous. ”

“ Despite all the indignant assertions to the contrary, the problem and conflicts of love are of fundamental importance for humanity, [10] and with increasingly careful study, it comes out ever more clearly that the love-life is of immensely greater importance than the individual suspects. As a consequence of the recognition that the true root of the neurosis is not the trauma, but the hidden erotic conflict, the trauma loses its pathogenic significance. ”

“ In one particular respect there is an analogy between the response to trauma of some parts of the body of the individuals of a species susceptible to shock and the response to trauma of the individuals in certain other great divisions of the animal kingdom. ”

“ The Predisposition for the Trauma No neurosis will grow on an unprepared soil where no germ of neurosis is already existing; the trauma will pass by without leaving any permanent and effective mark. From this simple consideration it is pretty clear that, to make it really effective, the patient must meet the shock with a certain internal predisposition. ”

“ When we review the abnormal or morbid forms of the affective life: destructive impulses, phobias, incurable melancholy, sexual perversions, failure of the moral sense, insanity of doubt, etc., and seek their causes, we at once find some which are proximate or immediate. Among the most frequent are physical maladies, injuries to the head, sudden shocks, as in railway accidents; sorrow, whatever its origin, whether love, ambition, ruin, separation ”

“ There is experimental evidence that the emotion of fear and the sensations of pain, at least the sensations resulting from trauma, have a physical basis, manifested by histological alterations in the nerve cells of the brain. ”

“ And as, when head or eye in us is smit By assailing pain, we are not tortured then Through all the body, so the mind alone Is sometimes smitten, or livens with a joy, Whilst yet the soul's remainder through the limbs And through the frame is stirred by nothing new. But when the mind is moved by shock more fierce, We mark the whole soul suffering all at once Along man's members: sweats and pallors spread Over the body, and the tongue is broken, And fails the voice away, and ring the ears, Mists blind the eyeballs, and the joints collapse,— Aye, men drop dead from terror of the mind. ”

“ Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each other at right angles, and moving to and fro. Our whole nervous organization is 'on-edge' at the thought; and yet what emotion can be there except the unpleasant nervous feeling itself, or the dread that more of it may come? The entire fund and capital of the emotion here is the senseless bodily effect which the blades immediately arouse. This case is typical of a class: where an ideal emotion seems to precede the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing but an anticipation of the symptoms themselves. ”

“ If disturbances from explosion and from emotional shock, existing with or without traumatism, produce identical results, it is evident that they have a common factor and this common factor can be only the emotion itself. ”

“ In fear, suppress the palpitation of the heart, the hurrying breath, the trembling of the limbs, the widening of the muscles, the peculiar state of the viscera; in anger, the heaving of the chest, the congestion of the face, the dilatation of the nostrils, the clenching of the teeth, the staccato voice, the impulsive tendencies; in sorrow, get rid of tears, sighs, sobs, suffocation, anguish—what will remain?—a purely intellectual state, pale, colourless, cold. A disembodied emotion is a non-existent one. ”

“ To the first group we add those cases in which the patient has not reacted to psychic traumas because the nature of the trauma precluded a reaction as in the case of an irremediable loss of a beloved person or because social relations made the reaction impossible, or because it concerned things which the patient wishes to forget and which he therefore intentionally inhibited and repressed from his conscious memory. ”

“ In a biologic sense pain is closely associated with the emotional stimuli, for both pain and the emotions incite motor activity for the good of the individual. The frequent occurrence of post-operative and post- traumatic pain is accounted for by the fact that the operation or the injury has lowered the threshold of the brain- cells to trauma; the brain and not the local sensitive field is the site of the pain. ”

“ When the outward deeds are inhibited, these latter emotional expressions still remain, and we read the anger in the face, though the blow may not be struck, and the fear betrays itself in voice and color, though one may suppress all other sign. Instinctive reactions and emotional expressions thus shade imperceptibly into each other. Every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well. ”

“ First Period.—Moral pain is at first connected with an extremely simple representation, a concrete image—that is to say, the immediate copy of a perception. It may be defined as the ideal reproduction of physical pain. It only presupposes a single condition, memory. The child who has had to swallow an unpleasant remedy, or who has had a tooth extracted, experiences when the next occasion approaches a pain which may be called physical, since it is connected with a simple image, of which it is the weakened copy and echo. ”

“ It is not true that we suppress painful ideas into the "unconscious." We do not forget our painful ideas. On the contrary, painful ideas stand out all the more prominent in our consciousness. Pain hammers experience into the mind. In fact we may say with more right that it is the pleasurable ideas that are forgotten, while the painful ideas are remembered. An experience associated with pain is never forgotten. Like a splinter in the flesh, it remains in consciousness. It is due to other causes that a painful experience becomes subconscious. ”

“ In the majority of emotions this test is inapplicable; for many of the manifestations are in organs over which we have no voluntary control. Few people in pretending to cry can shed real tears, for example. But, within the limits in which it can be verified, experience corroborates rather than disproves the corollary from our theory, upon which the present objection rests. Every one knows how panic is increased by flight, and how the giving way to the symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions themselves. ”

“ They pass through a physiological period of incubation, marked by palpitations and vaso-motor disturbances, rushes of heat to the head, headaches, præcordial anxiety, insomnia, agitation, fatigue, malaise, and undefined suffering. 2. The entrance into the psychological period is marked by the appearance of a fixed idea. Why one rather than another? This question will be examined later. The fixed idea, reigning as a tyrant in the consciousness, gives an aim to the tendency, determines its orientation. ”

“ Many investigators, including non-psycho-analysts, came to the conclusion from these and similar observations, that these disturbances are not the direct effects of the trauma, but psychical reactions to it and act in the service of the instinct of self-preservation against the repetition of the unpleasant occurrence. We know that also the normal organism has at its disposal such protective measures. The symptoms of the terror, such as the immovable legs, the tremblings, the hesitating speech, seem to be useful automatisms ”

“ Some rapture in the soul makes the brain numb, and thence sudden or lingering death;—some rupture in the brain makes the soul insane, and thence life worse than death, and haunted by horrors beyond what is dreamt of the grave and all its corruption. ”

“ We take the observable fact in the rough, whether legitimate or not. Now, does not the believer, whatever his degree of culture, whatever his religion, at the moment when he feels the emotion, tremble, turn pale, exhibit the sacer horror, the overwhelming awe which may end in unconsciousness, the prostrate attitude? Have not the mystics over and over again described the violent disturbances which agitate them, the internal tempest which ravages them, till, calm being re-established, they express themselves in language frequently recalling that of sexual love? ”

“ The absence of personal fear, the consciousness of security as great in the midst of pestilence and storm, as amidst beds of flowers on a summer morning, and the certainty that whatever appeared evil, or was assuredly painful, must eventually issue in a far greater and enduring good—this general feeling and conviction, I say, would gradually lull, and at last put to entire rest, the physical sensations of grief and fear; so that the man would look upon danger without dread,—accept pain without lamentation. ”

“ Nor has the sight of suffering in illness any exciting effects, only that which is due to violence, and when there is a visible cause for the suffering, such as cuts and wounds. (Bruises, from the absence of blood, have only a slight effect.) The excitement is intensified if she imagines that she has herself inflicted the injury. ”

“ The mind teems with sensations, images, ideas, feelings, emotion moods; now the whole organism is pierced by sharp pain, now it tingles with indescribable acute pleasure; now a charming vision appears, a beautiful scenery unrolls before the mind's eye, a feeling of perfect heavenly bliss diffuses itself all over our conscious being; now a disgusting, ugly figure presents itself, a horrible scene is witnessed that plunges the mind into an abyss of misery. The current of consciousness is accelerated and it drives its waves with more vigor than ever. ”

“ Exactly what happens is that the emotional disturbance—whether it be a fright, a grief, a worry, or what not—while perhaps completely forgotten by the victim, so far as conscious recollection is concerned, remains subconsciously alive in his memory, is ever seeking to emerge again into conscious remembrance, and, failing to do this, takes its revenge, so to speak, by the production of disease symptoms ranging from mere eccentricities of thought and behaviour to symptoms mimicking those of true organic disease. ”

“ And then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent. ”

“ Burrows like an arrow in the flesh.” The wounding and painful arrows do not come from without through gossip, which only attacks externally, but they come from ambush, from our own unconscious. This, rather than anything external, creates the defenseless suffering. It is our own repressed and unrecognized desires which fester like arrows in our flesh. ”

“ That noise of infinite pain, of frantic, dying agony, those convulsive, ghastly groans and scuffling of feet, and wrestling, writhing bodies, were spell-binding beyond the power of human conception, and the most awe-inspiring fantasy. I tried to reason with myself, but the horror scattered all reasoning, yet a sense of duty, of natural humanity, and anger with my own fears, kept tugging at me. It seemed as if the sounds were losing force, were beginning to die out. I was lying still in abject terror, whilst a fellow-creature was being deliberately done to death. ”

“ All these manifestations, formerly held to be supernatural, are now recognised as morbid phenomena, of which mental pathology describes the physiological causes, the natural course, the fatal issue. Even in frightful disorders order has been discovered ”

“ When we dream of anything, we do so because an incident of the waking life has, through association of ideas, roused some dormant emotional “complex,” some group of subconscious ideas relating to matters which are, or once were, of great significance to us, and our dream is a symbolic expression of this dormant complex.4 So is it with the man who suffers from a fear-induced malady, whether it take the form of a mental or of a physical disorder. ”

“ From the evidence just given it appears that any high degree of excitement in the central nervous system, whether felt as anger, terror, pain, anxiety, joy, grief or deep disgust, is likely to break over the threshold of the sympathetic division and disturb the functions of all the organs which that division innervates. ”

“ When you find yourself suddenly precipitated into an abyss of moral suffering, after the terrible shock which stuns, which bruises even the most delicate fibres of your heart, that which is, above all, most frightful, is this sudden night, black and profound, of the soul, which does not permit one to see even the thousand wounds by which it is torn. ”

“ When he fell ill he suddenly lost the well-regulated world and found himself in the chaos of an overmastering dream, a sea of blood and fire; the world was out of joint; everywhere conflagration, volcanic outbreaks, earthquakes, mountains fell in, followed by enormous battles where the peoples fell upon one another; he became involved more and more in the battle of nature, he was right in the midst of those fighting, wrestling, defending himself, enduring unutterable misery and pain ”