The author carefully goes through Freud's elaboration of the theory of trauma. A careful reading of Inhibition Symptom and Anguish (1925), where a final formulation is reached, underlines Freud's attempt to find a common basis between transference neurosis and traumatic neurosis. He also considers Freud's insistence on maintaining the notion of traumatic neurosis as a sign of his belief in the irreducible complementarity of the binomial: external reality = psychic reality.

Trauma is due to outside intervention but also, according to Baranger (1988), to the absence of the object, something that should have happened, but didn't take place. Referring once more to the 1925 work, he takes into account the ideas of authors the ideas of authors such as Winnicott, Balint, Bion, and others,