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This paper focuses on trauma, particularly the history of trauma in psychoanalysis—a highly traumatic history. The author suggests, using data unearthed primarily over the past twenty-five years and with reference to Caruth's work on trauma theory, that the psychoanalytic exploration of trauma itself followed a traumatic course and therefore also needed a double, belated emergence to find a “voice” and hearing. This traumatic course had its stormy inception in the early period of psychoanalysis. The work of Sandor Ferenczi, especially in his last years, brought to the fore the crucial importance of actual childhood trauma and its impact on personality and on the analytic treatment. These claims were a daring contradiction of Freud's view that memories of sexual abuse are based on instinct-driven fantasies. Furthermore, Ferenczi investigated daring therapeutic methods for coping with the reliving of traumatic overstimulation, terror, and dissociation in treatment, with the analyst serving as an important reparative force. All this created a tragically growing irreconcilable rift between Freud and him, particularly over Ferenczi's final innovative clinical thinking and the presentation of his last, seminal paper “Confusion of Tongues” (1933). After Frerenczi's untimely death and the sweeping rejection of his later ideas by the psychoanalytic community, the study of childhood trauma in psychoanalytic thinking and practice was considerably delayed, and evolved significantly, for the most part, only in the past few decades. This most traumatic course of events in the history of psychoanalysis is described in great detail in this paper.