Social Clinic in Extreme Situations: The Trauma in Collective Dimension

Abstract

This article describes clinical treatment after traumatic situations, as being understood as psychic and psychopathological events with subjective and social dimensions. The subject’s psychic reality represented by the sum of the traces left by his or her relational experiences tells about the consequences, pathological or otherwise, of a potentially traumatic event: a violent break in the continuity of the subject’s everyday life. Psychoanalysis understands traumatism as consisting not only by the shock caused by an outside agent but as also closely related to the individual’s specific ability to react. This would be the basis of the psychotherapeutic treatment of traumatism. Such clinical approaches to extreme situations are based on the supposition that there would be a single nature of neither the traumatic experiences nor the defenses mobilized to cope with them. The clinical focus of social realities shows the importance of cultural flexibility when participating in local intervention teams and designing strategies to be implemented. Clinical practice which is based on the subject shows that even if the mental apparatus is able to expand its ability to protect itself by warding off traumas, the consequent reorganization has psychic costs that can either favor or block therapeutic work.

Keywords: psychic trauma; psychic reality; psychopathology; social clinic; psychoanalytic clinical practice.