The body psychoanalysis has identified two categories of structuring traumatisms:

• The primary traumatism of birth
• The secondary traumatisms, at three distinct periods: infancy, childhood, and adolescence

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Extract from the book: “The Nuclear Psychology” - Edit’as Pub.

We distinguish, at this moment of our knowledge, two categories of traumatisms: one primordial traumatism, and three secondary traumatisms. The first one seems to lay a message that the three others have for mission to repeat, everyone in their own turn, at the different ages of existence, a little bit like a vaccine followed by three boosters.

The first one, the perinatal traumatism, that we have called “primordial” because we have not– at least so far – found anterior one(s), would program each one of us into a personality, which means in a very personal way of being shaky in life. While the three others - the one of infancy, of childhood and adolescence – would constitute reminders, updating the initial program according to the specific conditions of each age. But I say it again, because at the end of twenty years it has become an evidence : whatever is the traumatism, for a certain human being, it’s always exactly the same story which repeats itself. Only the characters and the circumstances vary from a traumatism to another. This way we are filled with a single personality which will evolve with age without losing his/her identity.

So, what is a traumatism? How is it built? What is the so specifically particular about this instant so that it impregnates so deeply our intimate construction?

When we try to define this crucial moment, we notice that it needs several definitions, and this is maybe only through the crossing of all those different definitions that we shall manage to perceive its real nature.

First principle

The traumatism is first an existential pain, resuming a whole period of our life. It is in a way a concentrate of memories gathering into a central event, like the summer musical hit contains the atmosphere of a whole season. Unlike the other memories, this instant has been, most of the time, forgiven or repressed. Yet, at the moment where it is lived again, it carries the power of enlightening a whole age of our existence. Moreover It is not, unlike what we could think, the most spectacular or remarkable event of this age, but it is certainly the most unbearable and painful event the child could live from inside.

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Second principle

A traumatism always appears in certain circumstances where the child meets, at the same time, as much pleasure as shame. His interiority will be violently torn by these two opposite forces of equal intensity. On the contrary, every time that there will be more pleasure than pain, or the opposite, this will produce only a memory.

Not being able to feel simultaneously two opposite perceptions constantly cancelling each other, he finds himself into an unbearable situation, a real deadlock. The result is a huge interior conflict where, to save his own balance, the child should choose a version of the world, and renounce to the other. He will have to cut and separate himself from half the feeling of things. This sensorial castration, that so evidently he postpones as he has such a premonition that he will have to go without a part of his sensitivity, and yet he has to come up with a decision, mutilating himself, if he wants to go on living without taking leave of his senses.

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Third principle

The traumatism is also a crucial instant where a behavioral scenario establishes itself, by a mere reflex of survival. This scenario will program us into a personality with operating modalities that are specific to each of us. So, to have the feeling we exist, and because it is the way we have learned how to survive, from now on we shall try to find situations in life similar to those of our traumatism, either by attracting identical circumstances, or by misreading what we are living in order to read again our past. The traumatism leads to programming a behavioral scenario determining our personality and making us live in OUR world and not in THE world.

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Fourth Principle

From another point of view, the traumatism also represents a pinnacle of love-hate between ourselves and the whole human being. But in this conflict between “what I could be” and “what the human reign assigns to me”, in this conflict between ourselves and the others, it needs a circumstance executioner for the traumatism to be. In the majority of cases, this circumstantial tormentor will naturally be one of our folks, among the closest to the child, his parents, his grand-parents, his brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, or sometimes, even a friend of the family. And those will be, for permanent proximity reasons, the ones seen as “the” human being. So let’s stop making parents guilty: they aren’t bad fathers or bad mothers, they simply are the representatives of an imperfect reign. And this nuance is important, because what the child will suffer from, much more than the clumsiness of only his father or only his mother, it is the discovery of behavioral secrets of our species, the revelation of human’s limits.

In this essential traumatism the unavoidable representatives of our species, messengers of man’s natural imperfection, are the mothers. And whatever they do, what the child experiments is bound to happen.

According to the traumatism of infancy, which take place before six, we always find the violent discovery of family’s secret. This means all the horse-trading of power and seduction, all this network of influences, all these conflicts and unconscious loves which make the tissue of a family through its common history.

During the traumatism of childhood which takes place, depending upon the sex, before twelve and fifteen, what the child will find out is the sexual secret. He will discover this force able to charm an adult to the point of having the feeling to own him from inside - horrifying situation which gives as much pleasure as shame. In this traumatism, the child discovers a seductive ambiguity able to fight authority, often the paternal one. He will explore, burning himself, a way to attract attention and to gain importance from the clan’s chief. But through this sexual ambiguity, he will bear the secret of shame, the secret of fault. There again, the circumstantial tormentor will only be a representative of our species, showing how much every man is guilty, and shameful for his pleasure. Thus the child will learn how to indulge in pleasure, which always carries a feeling of guiltiness.

At last, with the traumatism of puberty, the adolescent will fathom out the secret of his/her forbidden difference. Between his/her idyllic love dreams and the love reality he goes through, there is a fracture. And he/she will have to sacrifice his/her true feeling “that’s how I could have loved” to submit himself/herself to : “if you want to keep me, that’s how you should love me!” Whether it is from treason of his/her best friend or due to an unhappy love affair, it’s always a lack of re-cognition of his/her difference.

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Fifth principle

From our twenty year practice, we are led to this other observation, like an evidence: the difference between subjective reality felt by the child and objective reality of the external situation. Even though for seventy per cent of cases, dramatic situations only take place in the child’s world, it doesn’t remove anything from the reality of his/her suffering. And we shouldn’t assume anyway that the child makes up a story: what he/she lives from inside is as true as what happens outside, and even if we have to make allowances, these are truly two realities. From our demand to make the past come back to life even in the smallest concrete detail we were able to discover that the traumatism, most of the time, comes from an interpretation of the adult’s world without it necessarily being the objective expression of external events. In this respect we all are equal into traumatic intensity. Whatever happened objectively, each one of us has undergone a pinnacle of internal pain, where, to save our skin, we had to choose not to see half of the world. Therefore there aren’t little or big traumatisms, but only, for everyone of us, an unbearable “I’m aching”.