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Freud wrote in 1909 that “a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.”
This paper is concerned with solving the mystery and breaking the spell which binds children who have become the victims of trauma. It illustrates how psychotherapy can free children from the worst effects of trauma by enabling them to accept both the reality of the traumatic event and of the feelings which it aroused. In this way both these elements of the traumatic experience can be integrated and a start made in the process of recovery. I give examples from the psychotherapy of two children and consider the stages by which recovery from trauma takes place, and discuss the role of the child psychotherapist in facilitating it.
In defining trauma I follow Freud's statement of 1926: “The essence of a traumatic situation is an experience of helplessness on the part of the ego in the face of accumulation of excitation, whether of external or internal origin.” This definition links the specific external event with internal psychic conditions and indicates the shattering, devastating and generally overwhelming effect of a trauma. Spontaneous recovery from such an event is possible, though commonly subsequent development is altered and takes a pathological course, as it did in the case of the two children whose clinical material I want to present. These children had both been subjected to recurrent traumas from their earliest years. They both had serious learning difficulties, and they were both preoccupied with monsters to the exclusion of all other interests. But I have selected them mainly because of the different response to trauma which each represents: one child retained detailed knowledge of the traumas but had no awareness that these events had been the cause of any suffering; the other child had retained no conscious knowledge of the traumas but remained overwhelmed by the distressing emot