Trauma diagnosis: difficulty in differentiating between recall and fantasy

• Published in: Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik, medizinische Psychologie Vol. 47; no. 3-4; p. 97
• Main Authors: Person, E S, Klar, H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: German
• Published: Germany 01.03.1997
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Child Abuse, Sexual - diagnosis; Child Abuse, Sexual - psychology; Diagnosis, Differential; Fantasy; Female; Humans; Mental Recall; Psychoanalytic Therapy; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - diagnosis; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - psychology
• ISSN: 0937-2032

This paper is intended as a contribution to understanding why, up until recently, there have been so few case reports of actual abuse and its sequelae in the psychoanalytic literature. We suggest that psychoanalytic insights into the nature of psychic reality, while indispensable to the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking, have nonetheless had the adverse effect of collapsing any distinction between unconscious fantasies and repressed memories. Moreover, the idea that knowledge of external reality is itself mentally constructed also has diminished interest in uncovering trauma and "real" history. We present a report of an adult analysis that illustrates the recovery of a dissociated memory of sexual abuse that occurred during adolescence, as a springboard to discuss problems analysts have had in dealing with trauma theoretically. We hypothesize that repressed memories and unconscious fantasies can often be distinguished insofar as they may "be stored" or encoded differently, and that consequently the sequelae of trauma and fantasy often, but not always, can be disentangled. We describe some different modes of encoding trauma and some different ways of remembering, re-experiencing, and re-enacting it. And, finally, we suggest why traumatic memories are increasingly accessible to patients today.