Trauma and the metaphor of oppression

In his early writings, Freud thought of trauma in two very different ways. The term could refer to any experience that is subjectively unbearable, or, as epitomized by the seduction hypothesis, it could refer to something that was done to one person by another. In today's psychoanalytic climate - and in the broader culture as well - the second way of conceptualizing trauma dominates our discourse, replacing the elegant ambiguity of Freud's early thinking. In this paper I explore the clinical implications of this largely implicit shift in meaning, considering what may have been lost in the process.