Traumatic neurosis revisited: drive-jouissance and the wounds of life

My thesis proposes a new reading of Freud’s theory of the traumatic neuroses which draws primarily, though not exclusively, on a number of key Lacanian concepts, including the Real, jouissance, the idea of ‘suture’, and Lacan’s ‘deconstruction’ of Freud’s drive theory. It also argues for a ‘cybernetic’ reading of Lacan’s theory of language, which he outlined in his second Seminar; and for a reappraisal of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit as a way to facilitate a better understanding of the retroactive nature of trauma and its relation to language and the drive. In my view, such a reading can provide a radical alternative to the current ‘mental health’ discourse of trauma which views it as something that ‘happens’ to human subjects, both on an individual and a collective level, and which is exemplified by the diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

A key aim of my thesis is to challenge the ‘mental health’ discourse of trauma by proposing a new way to understand how the Lacanian idea of an ‘inaugural trauma’ that constitutes the human subject is directly related to so-called ‘external traumas’, which in my thesis I refer to as ‘wounds of life’. This relation, I argue, is based on the idea that such ‘wounds’ disrupt the regulative function of the pleasure principle, which in ‘normal’ circumstances prevents the jouissance of the drive (drive-jouissance) from overwhelming the psyche. My key argument is that the theoretical establishment of such a link between the ‘inaugural trauma’ and the ‘wounds of life’ calls into question some of the key assumptions that underpin the current discourse of trauma, which is exemplified in what I call ‘the PTSD paradigm’. In particular it challenges the idea that trauma is something that ‘happens’ to human subjects and that its effects that can be ‘eradicated’ through various forms of trauma narrative.