The infantile psychic trauma from us to Freud: pure trauma, retroactivity, and reconstruction

At the beginning, before 1900, Sigmund Freud, with J. Breuer or on his own, works on the trauma as related to the aetiology of the transference neuroses and shapes a metapsychological description whose form is predominantly economic. At that time, the psychic trauma is equated to the infantile sexual psychic trauma. The concept of “actual” psychic trauma, isolated, likened to a break-in, seems to recover its place beside infantile sexual trauma, while the economic conception of trauma takes on new vigour. Freud’s “renunciation” of the theory of infantile seduction has been widely commented on, since he realized that part of the memories that arise in the treatment of hysteric patients could not be considered to be true memories of events that really occurred but were instead fantasy constructions invented afterwards by the patients. On the first level of the well-known aetiologic scheme, “sexual constitution” and “infantile experience” are summed together.