You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Reading a reaction to one's publication is usually a good thing for one's narcissism. In the best of cases, it is a good thing for one's thinking as well, as it obliges us to reconsider critically a number of our ideas. This is the case with the paper published by J. Mills, as a reaction to our “Actual Neurosis and PTSD” (Verhaeghe & Vanheule, 2005). In the first part of our answer, we will clarify certain of our ideas in the light of Mills's critical remarks. In the second part, we want to address what we consider to be the main problem in matters of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that is, the question of representability.
The title of Mills's paper gives a good summary of his central objection to our reasoning. In his clinical experience, the predisposition to future PTSD profiles is predicated “on earlier deficits in personality structure due to developmental traumas.” In his latest book (Mills, 2005) he has generalized the idea of “structural deficits in personality organization due to attachment pathology constituted as a disorder of the self and maintained on unconscious representational levels.” At first sight, this seems to be a major difference with our reasoning, where the actual-neurotic structure, based on a failure of the Other during the early child—parent interactions, is put forward as the predisposition to future PTSD. Nevertheless, there are more similarities than divergences.
Indeed, in our reasoning, the failed interactions between child and Other determine what we have called here the original trauma (Verhaeghe & Vanheule, 2005, p. 502) and elsewhere even the “structural trauma” (Verhaeghe, 2004, p. 317). When writing our paper and even right now, we are very much aware of the semantic difficulties. Stating that a disorder caused by a trauma is based upon a preceding trauma sounds too circular. That is why we considered it more important to elaborate the—indeed—structural context of this original trauma, based upon a reinterpretation and en