Anna Potamianou's concept of trauma is a dynamic one. Present at the origin of all psychic activity, trauma can re-emerge at any moment in the treatment, but whatever clinical forms it may take, Potamianou regards its destructive manifestations as expressions of a vital process with an inherent potential for reorganisation.

Potamianou draws together theories of psychic functioning, with its genesis and dysfunctions, as much from Freud as from contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Her two points of reference are constituted by the hallucinatory fulfilment of desire, that allows access to the registers of the pleasure–unpleasure principle, and by the invasive and structuring traumatic lineage and its tonalities. While working from the basis of the first topography and its dynamic unconscious, the author also draws on the second topography, with its broadened concept of the id as the source of a drive quality that is directly attuned to the somatic, in which