Wounded by Reality: The Collapse of the Self in Adult Onset Trauma*

To seek reality is both to set out to explore the injury inflicted by it, to turn back on, and to try to penetrate, the state of being stricken, wounded by reality,—and to attempt, at the same time to reemerge from the paralysis of this state, to engage reality, as an advent, a movement, and as a vital critical necessity of moving on.

In an earlier article (Boulanger, 2002), I described a forty-one-year-old businessman, Jonah, who was referred for treatment eighteen months after having been violently assaulted for no apparent reason by a battery of policemen in the hallway of his apartment building. Throughout the assault, he'd feared that at any moment he would be killed. This chance encounter left him in a posttraumatic no-man's-land. “I keep seeing these things over and over again,” he told me. “They just come into my mind … I can't cast a shadow over them. Time has gone. I am in a dead end. It's like you are walking along and suddenly you hit a wall. You can't go back and you can't go forward, you keep hitting the wall. I used to be interested in what was going on. Now I don't go out. I don't read the paper in case I read of violence. I don't watch television … I have lost hope of things being different … I am emotionally devastated … I have lost my soul.”

Jonah's symptoms are typical of the posttraumatic state: intrusive memories of the beating and consequent avoidance of anything that might remind him of it; the disruption of his sense of time and of his interpersonal relationships; feelings of numbness and loss of interest in the world around him. Today, analysts working with patients who, as adults, have confronted almost certain death—be it in an airplane crash, a life-threatening assault,