Trauma ou pulsion - pulsion et trauma Leçons à partir de la fantaisie phylogénétique (1915) de Sigmund Freud1

In 1983, the author discovered the outline of the lost twelfth metapsychological essay by Sigmund Freud, “Overview of the transference neuroses”, and published it for the first time in 1985. In the present article, she focuses on the second part of this outline, a speculative text in the form of a “phylogenetic fantasy”. In 1915, the extremely traumatizing events of the First World War had prompted Freud to return to the fundamental themes of the pioneering era when he had developed the model of the drive - a specifically psychoanalytic aetiological theory - on the basis of the model of trauma, of the theory of seduction. The traumatic model was the most conventional model. It only concerned traumatized people and emphasized a clear opposition between mental health and psychopathology. On the other hand, the scandal of the revolutionary drive model was that it concerned us all, the reality of our archaic infantile wishes, the inevitability of our instinctual drive nature anchored in the body, and our individual psychic structure which is under threat throughout our lives. Freud always considered the emphasis placed on traumatic factors as a tendency to abandon the revolutionary drive model. I will show how, in this phylogenetic fantasy, he tries to integrate with the drive model the traumatic factors of pathogenesis, whose action is equally unquestionable - so, no longer trauma or drive, but drive and trauma. However, in his phylogenetic imagination, he locates these traumatic moments in time, during the epoch when the climatic changes of the glacial era as well as violent social actions submerged our ancestors and left traces transmitted from one generation to another in their bodily substratum. Freud himself rejected this endeavour. However, this neo-Lamarckian document on this failure is not only of historical interest for us today, but also of current relevance.