Hot Trauma and Cold Trauma

This now classic distinction was introduced in 1985.

First of all, in order to define the field of trauma, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, it may be argued that many patients suffer from that which is unrepresentable and come to analysis in order to find a way to represent it: herein lies the traumatic aspect of psychic life.

These patients, for whom the maternal object did not constitute itself as a “framing structure” playing the role of a container of representative space (André Green, 2001 [1983], p. 77), expect analysis to offer them the possibility to put into the form of history the “blanks” created by the vagaries of their early psychic development. They hope to obtain representations of it. Among these vagaries, the inadequate, “not good enough” in D.W. Winnicott's terms, parental responses to the needs of these patients when they were children constitute the cold nucleus of the trauma.

By means of libidinal co-excitation,1 these patients transform this cold nucleus into a hot nucleus. On the clinical level, the “hysterical solution”, as a cover for depression, is a typical example of these traumas and of their transformations.

A young woman, aged 35, was apparently satisfied with her personal and professional success but there was something, nonetheless, that worried her: she could not stop herself from verifying - and for her it was “child's play” - her powers of seduction by consuming untiringly, like a drug addict, lovers whom she never kept for very long. The moment of the conquest was all exaltation and triumph; this was followed by depression, self-disgust and separation. Then there was a period of calm, an “anaesthesia of feelings”, she said, until “it begins all over again”.

Speaking about her parents, she mentioned a brilliant but distant father, who was completely absorbed in his own affairs and who was mainly interested in her younger brother. Her mother was overshadowed and depressed. During the first years, the analysis brought to light a