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Psychoanalysts have been keen observers of the phenomenology and dynamics of post-traumatic states. Yet, curiously, in contrast to other psychopathology, most analytic literature on the post-trauma syndrome fails to underline its unique transference characteristics.
As early as 1886, Freud, while studying with Charcot, was struck with the power of trauma to precipitate hysterical symptoms which he thought of as “hallucinatory reproductions of the fright itself” (p. 152). Later Freud observed that dreams in traumatic neuroses repeatedly bring the patient back to the situation of his accident. But, while Europe was immersed in World War I, Freud commented that “No complete explanation has yet been reached either of the war neuroses or of the traumatic neuroses of peace.” Was this because the uniquely analytic data base, transference, was still missing?
Since World War II, psychoanalysts have contributed to a growing body of literature on survivor syndromes, writing about the holocaust (Krystal, 1984; Niederland, 1964), military trauma (Kardiner, 1941; Kolb, 1983), disaster to civilians at Buffalo Creek (Titchener and Kapp, 1976), and Hiroshima (Lifton, 1967). Such reports reveal clear phenomena: intrusions of trauma, irritability, numbing, and survivor guilt; these clinical descriptions by analysts of post-traumatic states heavily influenced the formal nomenclature of PTSD in DSM III (1980) and DSM III-R . They have also added to our understanding of psychodynamic consequences of specific catastrophic stressors, for example, the overwhelming nature of subjugation to genocide in the holocaust, and the stigmatization of radioactively exposed survivors of Hiroshima.
Methodologically, these contributions to the survivor literature