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Fred Busch opened the meeting by addressing the general question of this panel: psychic functioning seems to be increasingly understood by some analysts to be something categorically different in trauma and in neurosis. Since its access to meaningful remembrance is usually barred, the trauma tends to be re-enacted in the analytic relationship. Hence, different methods—in particular focusing on the analyst's empathy, holding and containing—are proposed for treating traumatized patients. Busch challenged these assumptions especially with regard to the necessity of alternate techniques, with a number of observations:
with reference to Freud papers on technique, there is a general tendency to enact in the transference—in neurotic as well as in traumatized patients;
most memories before age 7 are stored as motor memories, thus early trauma would tend to be enacted similarly as any other childhood experience;
a deep emotional involvement of the analyst, empathy and containing are the basics for any analytic process to flourish and thus not specific to the treatment of trauma patients;
differences in how trauma is represented need to be considered, based on whether we are dealing with ‘shock’ or ‘cumulative’ trauma and the age at which the trauma took place.
Busch suggested that the focus on ‘the analyst's way of being with the patient’, the relational perspective, obscures a number of questions that underlie the panel, i.e. the accessibility of trauma to consciousness.
Stefano Bolognini presented an analytic case, Lisa, a young woman who had survived a traumatic car accident in which her boyfriend was killed. Lisa, who wanted analysis for professional reasons, could remember every detail that led to the accident, but very little about her time in the car before she lost consciousness and fell into a coma for several days. Bolognini reported that the accident was for a long time in the background or even forgotten between analyst and patient.