Figurações do Traumático: reflexões sobre o trauma e a traumatização psicológica

Abstract

Since its origins in surgical medicine in the 17th century, the term “trauma” has already received uses as different as its lines of investigation. Its use was related to tissue damage underlying the physical impact capable of fracturing bones and breaking organs; its existence was attributed to the terror of imminent death by derailment or by train collisions, which so tormented the imagination of industrial urban societies; it was finally related to the appalling procedures of the Nazi campaign during World War II. Whether as a fracture, whether as a psychological effraction, or as a collective memory, the concept of trauma reflects the transformations in the Western interpretation of suffering and misfortune and indicates the emergence of a contemporary social sensitivity that is politically oriented towards reparation and witness. Today, in its apotheotic flowering, trauma research coats its object with dense neurobiological technology, prescribing for it physiological systems, metabolic markers and a physicalist causality that gave second place to the old psychodynamic references by which its installation mechanisms were once revealed. Thus, trauma became a manifest element: it was extracted from the virtualized territory of memory – and the representation that would suggest it – to become visible in the objectivity of the folds, turns and sections of the cerebral apparatus. This research aimed to demonstrate how some of the meanings present at the origin of the conceptualization of the traumatic phenomenon, both in medical nomenclature and in its appropriation as an operative concept in the disciplines of the psychodynamic field, are able to elucidate the epistemological transformation that culminated in the profound reconfiguration of its explanatory matrice. In other words, it seeks to follow how psychological trauma gained autonomy over anatomical descriptions to be, around a century later, re-attached by it as an essentially bodily phenomenon and incorporated into neuroscientific grammar.