In the psychoanalytic discourse of the past years, the concept of trauma has become quite a hot topic. The reasons for this are the gradually increasing ability to deal more competently with extreme traumatization and its long-term effects, (for example genocide victims), the increased awareness of social and cultural grievances as well as cases of child abuse and rape which also stir up the professional public and draw attention, and rightly so, to sick, destructive and abusive tendencies in society. In this context however the complexity of the concept of trauma, as Freud conceived it, often suffers. The factor of external reality is often emphasized one-sidedly as the cause of the trauma, the internal factors are however ignored. In this volume, well-known authors examine these complex relationships from a present-day perspective against the backdrop of Karl Abraham’s groundbreaking work on traumatophilia from the year 1907.
