“Knowing and acknowledging trauma – psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and the lived body”

Abstract

The experience of trauma and of dissociation of traumatic experience raises important questions concerning the phenomenology of the self. What are the conditions for us humans to be vulnerable to trauma? Drawing upon the analysis by Merleau-Ponty, it is argued that trauma and the bodily structuration of traumatic experiences need to be thought of as the result of broken patterns of bodily sense-making coupled with the bodies of others. Traumatic symptoms are conceived as forms of disrupted implicit relational knowing.