Although psychoanalysis is a traditional study that works with cases, it is known that it has a long tradition of thinking and talking about trauma. In his studies on hysteria, Charcot developed the theory of trauma to understand these crises. When a physical trauma is not mentioned, it takes the individual's personal and family history and directs him to the conversation area. Thus, it aims to determine the temporality of the trauma. Bruer, like Charcot, created a tradition of treating trauma using the hypnosis technique. Freud said; He engaged the hyptonic method by pointing to the unconscious phenomenon that he would reveal from an economic perspective. (Habip, 2001) Thus, Freud abandons hypnotic treatment and opens up space for free association. For him, hysterical symptoms are linked to the personal history through speech - the unconscious. More clearly, trauma theory and treatment are based on talking.
Freud enables us to re-read trauma with the concepts he put forward in line with his studies on metapsychology in 1915. Freud defines trauma as follows: "We describe as traumatic any experience that exposes the psychic life to many stimuli in a short time, thus causing the patients not to be able to deal with these stimuli in a normal way or working on them and appropriating them, and causing disorders in the psychic distribution of the available energy" ( Freud, 2013, p.53). In other words, trauma is considered as the strain of the individual's psyche in the face of excessive stimulation.
When trauma is mentioned, the first thing that comes to our mind is external traumas. These traumas are mostly grief, separation, abuse and accident. However, when talking about traumatic experiences for psychoanalysis, we cannot ignore the importance of internal traumas. What is important at this point is the effect of the internal or external stimulus on the psyche, which will determine the traumatic level of the event. Therefore, the traumatic impact is subjective. Because the individual shows different coping skills against internal and external stimuli throughout his life. In the face of a traumatic situation, the individual's self perceives the trauma as a danger signal and becomes a warning. Therefore, in order for the individual to cope with the traumatic experience, It is expected that the inner self will step in and be included in the spiritual apparatus. If the self cannot protect itself against trauma, we can say that diseases are a stepping stone. (Yazıcı,2015, p. 17).
Freud included the concept of psychic apparatus in his 1st topographical view and defines it as follows: … Illness, crisis and trauma always give us important information about the functioning of our psychic apparatus'' ( quoted in Aloupis,2005, p.55). Therefore, the psychological apparatus is divided into three mental regions: Unconscious, preconscious and conscious, based on the individual's relationship with his spiritual elements. Since my work is limited to the subject of trauma, I want to focus more on the role of the unconscious. As we mentioned at the beginning of this section about the process of putting forward the trauma theory, it took Freud to the unconscious from an economic perspective by following hysterical symptoms. The unconscious, the most primitive part of the psychological apparatus, continues its influence throughout life, even though it comes from the archaic period and is pushed deep by being covered with the preconscious. When the continuity of its effect is mentioned, it opens up space for Freud's text "Remembering, Repetition and Assimilation": "The new concept introduced by Freud with the theory of second drives is "being forced to repeat over time." The desire to repeat the past is much stronger than the desire to look for a pleasant event in the future. (…) This impulse is a tendency that desires to go back, to reunite with what happened before. (…) The compulsion to repeat is the desire to return to the past and complete the action, which turned out to be impossible, without obstacles or returns.'' (Nasio, 2008, p.60) Therefore, is traumatic experience, especially internal traumas, the impossibility of answering a question that constantly repeats?
Psychoanalysis, which studies the importance of the neurotic individual's unconscious productions such as dreams, fantasies, clumsy actions and lapses, can only work with these symptoms that take us to the unconscious, the noise in the silences. Therefore, it is possible to say that the individual's desire is repressed and the repression can be expressed through these symptoms. As a result of these studies, an issue that is suppressed and cannot be worked on in the psychological treatment of the individual is addressed. It will open up space and allow it to be included in the analysis. More clearly, making the trauma talkable through unconscious symptoms includes the trauma in the analysis and enables it to gain meaning.
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