Lacanian Trauma

In psychoanalytic theory, trauma is marked by an event in the subjects life defined by its
intensity, by the subjects incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and longlasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization (LaPlanche and Pontalis, 465).
There are some distinctions between notions of trauma for Freud and for Lacan, and the
theoretical direction contemporary scholars take can be largely influenced by which version
resonates with them. For Freud, a trauma is retroactively induced when excess psychic
excitations penetrate the ego defenses, and can be worked through in the analytic setting by
binding the excess forces together.
For Lacan, however, a trauma occurs when there is an encounter with the Real, which is that
which denies signification. Lacan notes, theres an anxiety-provoking apparition of an image
which summarises what we can call the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of
the real lacking any possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object which isnt an
object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the
object of anxiety par excellence (Lacan, 164). These encounters with the Real are traumatic
experiences where the link between two thoughts have succumbed to repression and must be
restored through moving the event into the realm of the Symbolic (Fink, A Clinical
Introduction, 49). For Lacan, this was accomplished through analysis where the analysand would
symbolize that which has led his or her desire to become fixated or stuck (Fink, A Clinical
Introduction, 49). The desire is not to symbolize the entirety of the Real (as if such a thing were
even possible), but rather to symbolize that which the analysand has become fixated on, the
traumatic Real.
While Lacan makes reference to the encounter with Real as traumatic, his theory suggests that
this encounter only acts as a place-holder and the true trauma only occurs belatedly and through
repetition. This repetition of the event can activate symbolic meaning where the scene was
traumatized, elevated into a traumatic Real, only retroactively, in order to help (the patient) to
cope with the impasse of his symbolic universe (iek, 73-4). This notion of belatedness creates
a mathematic chain of parentheticals that Lacan makes reference to in his seminar on The
Purloined Letter. There is a Real(1) corresponding to a Symbolic(1) that creates anxiety in a
person who has become fixated on the Real(1). Through analysis, the patient signifies the event
draining a portion of Real(1) away and into the Symbolic, creating a new Symbolic(2) and
Real(2). It is from this chain that Lacan develops his theory of interpretation. For more on this
residual, see Finks The Lacanian Subject pages 25-30.

References
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995).

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Theory and Technique.

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar II: The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.
Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988).
Laplanche, Jean & Pontalis, J. B. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald NicholsonSmith. (New York: Norton, 1973).
iek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006).