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The concept of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been belatedly recognized by its inclusion in DSM-III (APA 1980). It has spawned a substantial body of specialist literature in which, despite Freud having written ‘Psychoanalysis and War Neurosis’ in 1919, psychoanalytic theory is given scant attention. Freud suggested war neurosis was a form of traumatic neurosis characterized by ‘an alienation of the self, social withdrawal, irritability, recurrent dreams and flashbacks repeating the details of the experience, and severe anxiety’. Moore and Fine (1990) state that ‘efforts to relate the disorder to personality structure and function and to explain the symptomatology in terms of defences, gains and somatization have not been entirely satisfactory’. Traumatic neurosis is described as having two forms: the first being where trauma acts as the precipitating factor revealing a pre-existing neurotic structure, the second where the trauma is a decisive factor in the actual content of the symptoms i.e. ruminations over the traumatic events, recurring nightmares, and insomnia. The symptoms appear as a repeated attempt to bind and abreact the trauma; such fixation to the trauma are accompanied by a more or less general inhibition of the subject's activity. Psychoanalysts when speaking of traumatic neurosis are generally referring to the second form (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973).
A trauma implies an injury, but what has been injured? The clinical picture suggests this is psychic security. In this paper I wish to suggest this is a psychic entity, and to explore and describe the concept, its development, psychic elements, organization and disruption.
During my researches into Holocaust trauma it became clear that the central traumatizing experiences were 1. annihilation threat, 2. powerlessness and 3. object loss (Garwood 1996b). Pondering on why these were so powerfully traumatizing led me to focus on the earliest experiences of annihilation threat and powerlessness, the in