1

Colette Soler
TRAUMA . - •
Conference given at the Álvarez Hospital, on December 15, 1998

The discourse on trauma began approximately at the beginning of the century, more or less contemporaneous
with the appearance of psychoanalysis, and in the Europe of the First World Quena. For example, the notion of
neurosis of fear (névrosede effroi) - which Freud discussed in his time, although 'fright can be produced by many
things, not only by iguetra -; It was precisely in the war that traumatic neurosis as such had the opportunity to be....:
-.posed. .. 1 ■. ,
:
" Today the reflection on trauma is everywhere, not only in the discourse of psychiatry, but
7 also in the discourse that refers to mental health policies and at the legal level, when • | It is about the problem
of compensation for the traumatized, or when it comes to the ; - responsibility for disasters.
Yo ; "There is a whole discourse on the point, and curiously, in the field of psychoanalysis now there is not much
talk about trauma; there is more talk about ghosts and symptoms than about trauma. A certain opposition is
immediately evident, because when someone talks about the ghost - even the symptom - it. subjective implication is
present. And in trauma one thinks, rather, of responsibility. ; subjective is not involved.
J It is true that the psi field, one can say "of traumas", far exceeds the field of psychoanalysis. Finally, when
we define trauma we talk about a traumatic event; when there is a breach of a real that falls under the individual. .., a
reality impossible to anticipate, and at the same time impossible to avoid. A real, which is why we also call it real,
which seems to exclude the incidence of Fe! unconscious, or the desire of the subject suffering from the trauma.
So we talk about trauma when there is an outburst of pain, suffering, and fear, through an unexpected
encounter.
The bibliographies on trauma are very abundant. There are a number of studies on the war: from '14 to '18, in
Europe; I talked about the last war between '39 and '45, always in Europe; then the Vietnam War. .Each one
with its accumulation of; bibliography regarding the thiaumatized. Also the Gulf War, the Arab-Israeli War
and others.
But there are also the victims of terrorism, the victims of sexual attacks, always more numerous, and the
victims of natural disasters, which they call "natural."
Here we see that perhaps the intrusion of the traumatic real is not homogeneous.
On the one hand, there are traumas of war and sex, which involve the Other, which imply the Other's will to
enjoy one way or another. ,
natural
But when it comes to " " catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, this seems the most real
of the real, without the incidence of the Other.
And between the two types of trauma causation, there are others that are not so natural, such as Chernobyl;
natural catastrophe, but at the same time very human.
What catches my attention is the. Modernity is that in our society, on a fairly collective level, a restorative
Other is encouraged in the face of trauma. That is to say, in the name of solidarity, an Other is manufactured
that constructs the discourse on trauma and its solutions, and by ; consequently the necessary aid. Yes
interesting as a phenomenon! Because in a society in which we assume God's death was recorded; in a time
where we no longer have the sense of tragedy, of ancient tragedy; in a time in which we no longer believe in
destiny...; On the contrary, we have the feeling of contingency.
However, the Other of the discourse, despite being fragmented and inconsistent, manages to construct a
substitute Other, which is the Hearing® of solidarity. And that is interesting because Ríos indicates that each time
and each culture invents figures of the Other,
Now, we may wonder why we have so many traumas, is the point.
Could it be that today the causes of fear have multiplied? This can be evaluated, but it is not certain. Perhaps,
rather, it is that the subjects' resources are now weaker. That the discourses that regulate social ties - in the
sense that Lacan uses - do not manage, as they did before, to act as a screen for the real. And that is what I am
going to develop a little, the theme of screen discourses, I called them that.1 , ‘
1'Discourses-screen, work by Colette Soler in Psychoanalytic Studies 4 (Trauma and Discourse), Eolia/Miguel Gómez
 2
It is true that each discourse, whether that of the master, that of the university, that of hysteria, that of the
analyst, also, to a certain extent, builds with its values, with its order of satisfaction. Each discourse interposes
a covering, a protective envelope, with its semblance, with its order between the subject, the subjects and what
we call the real.
That is why Lacan speaks of the generalized dream. It means that thanks to the symbolic constructions of
discourse, we live in a cradle, in a protective envelope that shelters us from what?: from the fatal encounter.
And finally the only thing awake, or what is closest to awake, is the nightmare.
The multiplication of nightmares in modernity (metaphorically speaking) is a fact that seems to be produced
because discourses are losing their consistency.
When there is a consistent discourse, which means a discourse that proposes stable meanings, shared more or
less by everyone and that organizes the ties, the subjects are protected from brutal irruptions, and they are
protected from traumas, '
On the contrary, when the discourse loses its consistency, when the screen becomes holey, I am going to say it
using a play on words from Lacan, there is trountaiisme (hole/matism), in French írou means hole. And I also
made another play on words, what is trop/nialisme, trop means excess, too much. That is, the trauma not through
a hole, but through an excess. Excess of what?: an excess of reality or something that threatens:
So, the idea is that leaky discourse is the main cause of the multiplication of traumas, and is the sign of the
impotence or limitations of the discourse of modernity.
It looks very good, for example, if we take a famous catastrophe: the earthquake in Lisbon, in Portugal, in
1755. There was a considerable impact throughout Europe, and there are great texts, great controversies
around that earthquake, which almost destroyed the city. . Is there a great text by Voltaire, and also by Jean
Jacques Rousseau, to reflect on this event? It was somewhat trembling, but it was not totally traumatic, to the
extent that Rousseau (and it is seen very well in this one, more than in Voltaire) that he will take a position
that differs from the other authors of his century, saying: " Men have deserved it, they have deserved the
destruction of Lisbon, and it is Divine revenge." With that, an era manages to act as a screen for trauma, it
manages to give it meaning. He believed that there is nothing real, even the most frightening, that a discourse -
a consistent discourse - is not capable of softening (amadouer), of accommodating.' : : |
2
I did, in another text , a first demonstration of that with two examples, with a piece of literature, which is the
work of William Shakespeare, titled Henry V, There is a text of the harangue of King Henry who wants to
lead his soldiers into a battle that is sure to lose. It is the famous battle of Agincourt. In the context there was a
large, rested French army, and the English were a small troop, exhausted by previous battles. Everyone
thought they were going to die - and Shakespeare writes a harangue. We really see the author's exercise, we
see how through the verb, - only with the verb it is possible to overcome even the death drive; Rather, it is
possible to overcome the life drive, the principle of pleasure, and to enthuse men to die. And we see how the
king manages to transmit not only the spirit to overcome the life drive, but also manages to transmit what we
can well call the enjoyment of death.

Ediciones, Málaga, Spain, 1998. [Note Added]

2 idem 1 [Added Note]

9
 "Lacan once said that you can never predict the outcome of a battle, because it depends on which side there is
more enjoyment in dying. It is a phrase that surprised me and that stuck with me. Of course ; I guess it was
valid for the past? when the battles were hand to hand. Because right now
. Battles are decided at such a level of technology that one dies without having the time to enjoy the
death, which is a real loss, because if I know I must die, it is better to die giving a meaning to death, ■
of course! Yo . . ■
• They could think that Shakespeare is literature, far away, in the past, which is true, but if they think what we
see in recent times called modern times, the suicide attacks (which we have
.; known in the last war). If you think about those who are called "madmen of God", ready to die,
F** by his faith, by his God, it is seen that there are modern forms of what I evoke in common with a speech
in
that can be commanded to the instinct of life, and of death. And by commanding the instincts of life and
death, you can screen the traumatic element of death itself, of pain and) । • suffering itself. Another
example I took to demonstrate how discourse can involve reality,
!! f T is that of a German author, who you may know: Ernst Jünger, He died curiously just what he was writing
about. When he wrote his text he was over 100 years old,103, I think, and he died last year. At the age
of 18 Jünger was sent to the Front, in the War from *14 to *18, between France and Germany.
Returning from combat, he wrote a text called, in German, "Der kampf ah innere
. erlebnis'\ It was first translated into French as "War, our mother", which is a bad
■ translation, later it was better translated, as "War as an inner experience." The experience
interior” is an expression of the writer Georges Bataille, that is a good translation and with an excellent
preface.
The text must be situated in history: when the author writes it it is just after the war, the First World
War, and of course, the furor does not exist yet, Bolshevism has just begun and has not yet manifested its
results. civilization.
But the book is interesting in what? It shows us a subject, truly young, exposed to horror, and who has,
for a personal reason (not because of the surrounding discourse), a special resistance to trauma. Emst Jünger
is an "intraumatizable". It is read in your text, and I wondered. because.
It is not because as some say, he is a fascist. In any case he is not a fascist at all, he is too individual to
be a fascist. We see the operation he attempts, and that it has two legs: First he has a capacity for
sublimation, from one individual to another the sublimation capacities are very diverse, and he has a
remarkable capacity against the intolerable. It has the position of saying, (not saying without doing), of
thinking about what happens and giving it a meaning, of constructing a meaning. And finally he ends up
thinking that in the horror of suffering, of destruction, what occurs are what he calls "the wonders of the
future."
So, on the one hand, an incredible sublimation capacity - but on the other hand, something that is 5
exactly the same as in Shakespeare's King Henry V's harangue, as a
' horror eroticism. There is in him, in Emst Jünger, a curious consent to the drives, and a
: position of lucidity in the face of men's impulses. He is not a man who has great
j propensity for repression, we can also say that "songs are not sung in front of the bad guy."
‘ d So, I think it is certain that a consistent discourse can put distance to what is real. Even,
: : One last example can be seen in that direction: the Apocalypse, which describes the Bible, which
attempts
: describe the horror of horror. The Apocalypse is not traumatic, the Apocalypse is not the summum of the
, Yo thinkable trauma, to the extent that it is horror, but horror that has a meaning in the
. ■ : speech that describes it. That is to say that it has the sense of divine vengeance, and that then it is a
, ! : discourse in which the Other exists. And true rauma cannot appear when the Other exists.
r: When the Other exists, in a discourse that makes M Otfo exist, there is pain, there is possible suffering,
: OR there is extermination, there is all the horror you want; but it has the sense of the will of the Other,
r', It is when there is the hole that the subject finds himself in front of a meaningless real, and in this case,
2
¡ Yes we find the multiplication of trauma, Bs what happens now, we lack the Other. We lack the
 4

Another to act as a barrier to traumatic events. And of course, we have a discourse that tries to propose • 79’

meaning,
But the modern subject, we can say using the expression of tacan, is a "non duperie" subject, a subject not
involved in the debate, who no longer believes in the semblance that allows us to give meaning to the
real. And that is why today it seems to me that the subjects have become more trautnalizable than
before. It is not that there is more emergence of reality, there are new forms. It is not a problem of
quantity, but there are more traumatizable subjects. It seems to me that the traumatized subject teaches
us about what memory is, to the extent that the traumatized person cannot forget. He cannot forget the
images of horror, they return to him at night, if he has excluded them during the day. Freud noticed it, he
is a subject who does not have "répit", rest, and all his interest, all his libido is captured by what we call
the memory of the traumatic moment.
It is not by chance that Freud became interested in trauma, that is, impossible forgetting. And he was
right to be interested in trauma from the beginning, to the extent that he discovered early that hysterics,
as he says, suffer from "reminiscences." That is to say, they suffer from their memory, would be another
way of saying it. He also thought of the unconscious as a memory.
But we see with the traumatized person, I'm not talking about the hysterical ones, I'm talking about the
traumatized person in the current sense, who surprisingly found a reality. Confirming with him that
impossible forgetting is not a memory, it is the opposite: impossible forgetting is a lack of memory.
To the extent that there is memory there is memorization. When the real encounter is inscribed, it is
inscribed in images, in signifiers, in significations; That is to say, it is inscribed in signs in which the
subject recognizes himself. Memory is that: having a set of what we call signifiers, which can be images,
words, sensations; even having a set of signs, in which the subject can relocate when he summons his
memory, .
On the contrary, the impossible forgetting of the traumatized person is the resumption of something in
which the subject does not locate himself, does not recognize himself. That is why the return of trauma
is in itself traumatizing, and it is known that the severely traumatized are retraumatized, every night.
So we can say, with great certainty, that the structure of trauma is a structure of foreclosure. Of
forelusion in a precise sense, that is, a real that does not have its corresponding in memory, in the
symbolic, in the inscription.
That is why one can ask, and Freud himself perceived it, if there is no homology between the structure
of trauma and hallucination. Freud noted here a conjunction between what happens in the subject of
psychosis and in the traumatized subject.
I think it is because there is an identical structure, although the phenomenon is totally different. And it
is true that we can say that trauma is of the real foreclosed, of the real in excess, at the same time
impossible to bear: suffering, terror impossible to avoid.
* There are no resources, in the face of its irruption. And if I say real foreclosed, I must add that this structure
implies
non-subjective attribution. That is, the subject does not recognize himself as involved, he recognizes
himself as crushed, a victim; Peto does not take part.
They know that the expression subjective attribution is an expression that Lacan uses to comment on
hallucination, and that there is a whole problem facing a hallucinated subject, in each case, which is to
study, see whether or not there is subjective attribution.
So, if the trauma is of the foreclosed real, we can understand why we speak now, and rightly so, of a
“duty of memory.”
In Europe the notion of a duty of memory circulates, especially regarding what the "Shoa" was, and the
various genocides of the century. A "devoir de memo irc" means a need - to inscribe and at the same time
perpetuate in human memory; and reduce why when it is perpetuated in memory the traumatic element is
reduced.
I need to talk a little about neurosis and its relationship with trauma. It is a question that appeared from
the beginning of psychoanalysis: to know if the neurotic, and finally if each subject, would not be
traumatized from origin, that is, traumatized from the origin.

4
8$n ■ - , ' ,4. .. 5
It is a question that was presented at the beginning in Freud's work, and that is found again in the latest texts,
especially in the famous "Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety" of 1927 and also in
; “Moses and Monotheism", one of his great last texts.
. i The problem of trauma is, for Freud, a problem strictly connected to the question of where neurosis comes from.
And if you can remember and verify in “Inhibition, Symptom and Distress”, a chapter concludes saying:
''finally we are left with the enigma and the unresolved question of where the neurosis comes from. 1 ' Let's
look at Freud's progress: first he thought he discovered in the hysterics he treated at the beginning, he thought
he could discover that they were traumatized subjects. Sexually traumatized people who had suffered sexual
seduction from an adult, and precisely from an adult father,
But he quickly perceives the deception, and concludes, writing to Fliess: "I no longer believe in my
neuroticism," and says: "The supposed trauma was nothing more than the hysterical phantasm." Then it is the
metaphor, the replacement of the thesis of traumatic causality by phantasmatic causality. And he discovers
that the trauma was only the mask to conceal the ghost of the hysterical woman. It is firmly affirmed by
Freud.
Although we must not forget that there was always a small theoretical war around this thesis in
psychoanalysis, and that a psychoanalyst like Otto Rank, a psychoanalyst like Sandor Ferenczi, were not
entirely satisfied regarding the replacement of the ghost by the trauma. Even until a few years ago, I don't
know if you know Jefferson Massau, he is someone who has now left psychoanalysis, but when he was
dedicating himself, he published a thunderous, resonant thesis, saying that Freud was wrong and that the good
thesis was terrible. - g/,
% The ghost or trauma alternative has an evident ethical scope, not only a clinical one. 0 if you prefer, it has a
clinical scope. But the clinical scope always has its ethical implications, which is to say that the more one
emphasizes the traumatic element, that is to say the real foreclosure that is impossible to avoid, the more one
becomes *innocent", the subject is justified. If we emphasize the causality
: I 1 ; traumatic, we justify the subject that he cannot do anything, that he is a poor victim.
", '(The discourse on the victim is a powerful discourse in modernity, and the more we emphasize the .
gphantasmatic participation of the subject, but we indicate that the subject, despite his misfortunes, is not
, - । completely innocent. It is true that the psychoanalyst has no sympathy for 0) traumatic causality; to the extent
that traumatic causality allows the subject to deny his ) 1 responsibility, and that without it, his responsibility cannot
enter psychoanalysis. The practice
1 s analytic implies a subject who, despite encounters with the real, recognizes his involvement, J _ i attributes
something to himself.
or But on the other hand, when one finds oneself taken up with extermination, it is not the time to go to
, tell the subject: “And what was your participation in the disorder of the world?” They know what the phrase is
that Lacan uses to comment on Dora. When Dora finishes her description of the bad behavior of the father
and Mr. K, Freud returns a meaning: "What is your participation in this?" In these cases it is possible, but in
extreme cases it would be indecent, and also unfair. :
Then we must specify the line of fracture between the traumatic and the phantasmatic.
I continue a little with Breud, because he never completely abandoned, despite what is said, the idea of the
traumatic causality of neurosis. I return to the end of the work "Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety", "Moses
and Monotheism", especially the small chapter called "The Analogy", in which he talks about neuroses to
establish an analogy at the level of history. THERE Freud returns to the problem of neurosis. And finally he
reverses his theory of phantasmatic causality and ends by saying! "Every neurosis has a traumatic cause."
Only the definition of trauma has totally changed. “
¿ : Before of course, to do this thing, he had to advance in his theory of Anxiety, and they know that "Inhibition,
Symptom and Anxiety", is the text with which he surprised all his students, to

3
Neologism for "becomes innocent" [Added Note)
.■■ -- s'-d
Colette Soler......................................................................................................................................................................1
8$n ■ - , ' ,4. .. 5.........................................................................................................................................................5

I had installed the idea: 1.) repression of libido/drive; 2.) distress as a result. And in this text, as you know, he
 completely reverses and says I was wrong (it is interesting how a man like Freud recognizes his mistake) anxiety
is not the result of repression, it is the cause, the cause of repression. And thus he has managed to make anguish
really what we can call the affect of the real. The affect of the encounter with a real, at least in the sense of
something impossible to bear. An impossible thing to bear, and he would formulate it rather in terms of something
that cannot be assimilated to psychic reality. That is to say, to the symbolic order of a subjectivity.
$2 Thus he puts the traumatic moment (íravmatische moment) as an encounter with what he calls "a real danger," are his
terms; but what is a "real danger" in Freud's text? You can verify it, calling “real danger” the moment in which the
subject is confronted or overcome by an intractable excitement; That is the expression, an excitement that is both
unbearable and intractable. "r "
7 So the “real danger” in Freud is defined as excess of excitement. It is interesting because this ' ; : expression does not
indicate what is the cause of the excess of excitement. 0esalavezsomething.that came out,
diyerga catastrophes^Q^ comes from piyeT pulsíonair in jo^^ '
uncontrollable excitement ; and it is here that he proposes his term Hilflósigkéit^ détresse), the . . "helplessness", the
lack of resources. Each language makes you dream differently, patdmí, helplessness, in Spanish it sounds less
strong than the French or German word, in short, each language proposes its |" meaning. '
I want to point out the subtlety and theoretical benefit of this conception. Homelessness is defined as follows; At
an economic level: "there is helplessness when the subject is confronted with an amount of excitement and does
not have the strength to withstand it, or channel or distribute it."
Here the definition has two legs: on the one hand, the amount of excitement, and on the other hand the
capabilities of! subject to endure, or to elaborate excessive excitement. So, in helplessness, the definition of
trauma involves the subject. It is a definition of trauma that implies the real and the subject.
With that, effectively, we cannot think and we cannot do less as Freudians, which we oppose to the modern,
majority thesis, which postulates that there are standard traumas. And it tries to build standard modes of treatment
for standard traumas. Treatments are built for victims who have suffered bombings; A mode of treatment is built
for victims of sexual assault. But that is forgetting that different subjects do not have the same predisposition to
trauma, and that what traumatizes one does not traumatize another. That is why he took the example of Emst
Jünger, the non-traumatizable one. This is the first observation about Freud's thesis.
A second observation is that with the term helplessness, Lacan gives us what I can call the unary feature. A word
that puts in common factor, as we talk about putting in common factor in mathematics, a term common to
phenomenologically very diverse anxieties.
Indeed we hear it said that the anguish of losing the object, of losing the penis, the whole series of anxieties that
psychoanalysis has constructed; This entire series has one point in common, which is the situation of helplessness.
And that is the traumatic point, which is also situated, for example, in the anguish of birth, etc.
There is something about Freud's formulas that is repeated. It is repeated that the thesis is that all anxiety is
castration anxiety. But no, in this text the castration anxiety is in the series and tells us about... s 4,

abandonment; that is, the traumatic aspect of the loss of the penis, the loss of the maternal object, iH
that nourishes, the loss of love, and the loss of the protection of the superego. It is the series of well-known
castration anxieties, of which Freud says: "all these anguish

■ ■ - - 20-............................................**
, f
 • . . 7 4
phenomenologically different, they are castration anxiety.” But he finally recognizes that they are anxieties of
helplessness, of the situation of helplessness.
The anxiety regarding the penis is in itself an anxiety of helplessness, and to the extent that, as Ferenczi
emphasizes somewhere, (and Freud cites him precisely for that reason), losing the penis means being
confronted with the maternal object, an impotence that would deny an insurmountable excitement; a
helplessness then.
Here we have the term placed as a common factor of all traumatic anxieties. That is Freud's thesis, and we can
ask ourselves now, since I want to answer the question of neurosis, whether the unconscious is traumatic or not.
N Lacan located the unconscious in relation to memory, he said: "the unconscious is not losing memory, it is
remembering what one knows," What does that mean? It means that the unconscious J/ is made up of signs, images,
signifiers, in which the subject does not 1 M recognize. And in this sense the unconscious, which imposes itself on the
repetitions of the subject, which
imposes on the symptoms of the subject, it violates the subject in the same way as the real. So, effectively the
subject perceives the unconscious.
But when a subject perceives his unconscious, what is unconscious by definition?
1. A subject perceives his unconscious sometimes without analysis. I'm not saying that he treats it outside of
analysis, but he can perceive the dimension of the unconscious when he realizes that in spite of himself in some
situations, he suffers from an automaton. The same subject, who reacts in a way that is, for example, incoercible, that
he does not want to, but that he cannot prevent; and that is repeated. In this sense the unconscious has something
traumatic.
7 And there is more, there is that Freud's psychoanalytic thesis (taken up by Lácan until almost the end and
completed later) is that what is inscribed in the unconscious, what we call knowledge.
emeeaga--**-- ' ! ’ ... ” "2*

"traumatic s, of encounters that were traumatic in their origin , which would allow us to define a double level
of implication of trauma in the unconscious. The ing gm yíentq would be the return .to u tomatic^, and then
they traumatize^ the in^tnona of J oMr wtnathmos^
- Freud, in the chapter I mentioned, effectively ends by saying: "every neurosis is traumatic 11 , 7 and has a
traumatic origin. That is to say, each neurosis is characterized by the uncontrollable and unbearable return of the
marks of the original trauma.
■ Freud specifies what type of original traumas are. He says: "these are either experiences that concern the
subject's body, or perceptions that were affected via sight and hearing." That is to say, it clearly evokes the first
experiences of encountering a jouissance either at the level of one's own body, or at the level of surprising, in the
primary scenes, something of the jouissance of the Other. That is, either the threat of castration, or the seduction, or
the perceived primitive scenes. The thesis makes the unconscious something like the .stigma, ■ éjjTtemorial, leaves s
.........................................................................................................traumatic experiences dcljoce. It is understandable
;
why he could assume something like generalized trauma at the origin. It is that to the extent that the child receives a
discourse that does not have enjoyment in its program - if I can put it that way - and then he will inevitably
4j:33.
encounter a traumatic moment where he finds what was not inscribed in the discourse of which disposes, Be it
his own enjoyment, whether it be the enjoyment of the Other.
In this sense, it is true that the unconscious at the same time has something traumatic, and conveys the original
trauma. We can see that it is not the whole truth, that it is just an aspect of the structure, rather. Because
otherwise, how can we say it?, the unconscious itself is a screen against trauma.
This is what both Freud and Lacan have emphasized, saying it in a light, and more or less amusing way. The first,
saying that the pialos, the unfortunate real encounters, have therapeutic effects on the neurosis; which means
that a subject who has unhappy encounters appears less subject to his neurosis.
Lacan says the same thing in another way. During the last world war he found that his rheurotics were very
good, better than ever in the misfortunes of war; and more theoretically it ends in "Teleyisión" saying "The
subject is happy", which means that whatever they were

7
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the meetings, the events; At a certain level, the subject always manages to obtain his satisfaction. How to
understand it?
I think it is well understood, if you think that it is in the incorissente in which the marks of the first
encounters are inscribed, with the surprises of enjoyment, whether it is one's own enjoyment or that of the
Other. This unconscious is also the conduction apparatus, it defines the conduction paths of satisfaction.

To say it is that the conscious presides over the symptoms of a subject, and that the symptoms
take their forms of enjoyment; of reachw^WMLSparadoxical satisfaction, but, a satisfaction, nevertheless. Thus
Freud could verify that the subject feels his symptom, like himself . And the psychotic loves his delirium as
himself. At the same time he suffers from it, but it is him
Now, the subject with an unconscious, we can say that he was traumatized, but he was also vaccinated
against trauma. It is true that the unconscious is a filter that acts as a screen for the real, and with the result
that a subject is aware of an unconscious, he is to a certain extent vaccinated against all surprise.
+ It is terrible to see to what extent in the unconscious each neurotic subject always finds the same thing. It is a
massive, patent fact. The real is varied, the events too, the people in the world too, but each neurotic in this
field of infinite variety always finds the same thing. It is truly a shocking experience in psychoanalysis. It is not
excessive that we can conclude that the subject with this unconscious is vaccinated against the real, that is,
against surprise, against the unprecedented. I think that is why neurotics, even in associations of
psychoanalysts, dream of surprise, love and long for surprise, for good reasons. Because to surprise a neurotic...
it must be said that it is not that easy!
WIt is not the same in the psychotic, precisely because it does not have the same relationship with the
unconscious, with language. A psychotic subject is more open to encounter, to surprise, and therefore is a
subject who can be more surprised. Lacan noticed it, if a psychotic finds a real, he records it, notes the blow, it
can even be triggered, it can fall. A neurotic is a mattress, his incoriscient puts a cushion between him and the
blows. Obviously the unconscious also programs the blows for each one, always the same!
| Freud said it when he talked about the neurosis of destiny. In reality every neurosis is a neurosis of 1 destiny.
There are those who have friends who always betray them, they always find the ones | traitors. There are also
others who always find the woman unfaithful, there are others..., in short, all possible configurations. 1
"Let us say that in the conscious dream one never finds anything but what one expected, and thus the
” ngurotic laugh is fifi Suj^ptan traumatized him . .' .
(That's why Eacan uses this expression "happy mood." If you want to put it another way, a "happy subject " is the one
who always suffers from his ghost, and is the one who always suffers a pleasure from everything. We can ask
ourselves if such a subject can be traumatized, and to what extent? It is a question that I leave aside.
I am going to finish the point of the responsibility of the subject éri trauma, I think we can
follow Freud and generalize his thesis ^ay; siemjy' doscom^entes in utotfaunu^ trauma is effect

I said a while ago: in any case, for there to be trauma, we need subjective participation . / AsLtherealways^^
components: Jm^which is the blow of the real in all its configurations; and

simple, pure, real.

.SUoTw^is where I'm going to?Hamar consequences. It is a term that is used a lot in literature on trauma. The
blow of the real is the moment of foreclosure, that is what I have said, it has a structure of foreclosure.
Epunireal that appears without having its corresponding in J1 di^um np
scheduled then. That does not depend on the whole.on the subject; at this level the subject isfii^nt F
imme^e^as sequels, which are actually a second time, which is not. the moment of
encounter and what is it about in the sequels? This deals with the subjective repercussions, and of. the way
how the subject takes it, thinks about it
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Yo, He evoked Emst Jünger, his example. We see the symbolizing machine that he sets in motion in front of
0,. to the traumatic element. And at the level of the sequels, subjective participation is never lacking; this
• 11, always present. For example, a subject may think that the bad encounter was staged, plotted
,¡ This is an expression that I like from Lacan, who said that we cannot do less than think
,1 that things are plotted, that is, when there is unhappiness, we think that it results from a
. Other,
Then we cannot help ourselves but sustain the fantastic existence of the Other. It is true that it is not the same
thing to think that what happened had no meaning, it was pure accident, absolute contingency. Think, for
example, of recognizing the finger of God in the event, whether it is God or what we now call those responsible.
You can see that in modernity there is a hunt for those responsible. Every time there is a catastrophe, first we
help the victims and then we look for those responsible. Many times there are, of course, but sometimes even when
there is a hole in the ozone, those responsible are sought; It is a fact. Thus, we see him- an incoercible unáyüníentó
that will lead to the Other who would answer for the real meaninglessness. Then you could also say that the same
event has a subject. You can recognize the malignancy of the Other, or, on the contrary, think that it is a sign of the
Other's benevolence.
Let's take an example: survivors of disasters. It is totally different if the survivor thinks that fate was gracious
enough to let him live; or if he thinks otherwise, that it is a malignancy of fate to let him live, when everyone
else is dead. We could develop this infinitely,'___ ..... ....................... _
7 (Eliraumatism ensuinipact.es real, pure.real; the consequences, are of.sujetg. always And with that we understand that
psychoanalysts have something to say on the problem of the treatments of the "traumatized." Even quoting, it is not
about unconscious traumatization, when it comes to the traumas that I listed at the beginning.
I think it is urgent to criticize, oppose the deterministic discourse on trauma, the discourse that is constructed,
and considers that there is a bjunivocal relationship - if we can say between a trauma and the effects on the
subjects,
This has consequences and programs inconvenient treatments for the subjects: there are no standard
treatments because there are no standard subjects, there are no standard consequences . We must have both. com^
especially now when virtuality
traumatic - has become evident to the inconsistency of the "discourse, let's say, of modernity.

Text established by: Cristina Toro

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