Trauma

In psychology, trauma is a severe emotional injury caused by an adverse, threatening or disturbing situation that a person is unable to process adequately. Trauma is considered present when there is a risk to life, either one's own or that of others, or when the event is so difficult to assimilate that it cannot be understood, and is stored psychologically in a way that separates emotion from rational or cognitive comprehension.

The word comes from the Greek for wound. For a long time it was used mainly for physical injuries. It was psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing on the study of soldiers, disaster victims and survivors of violence, that extended it to the mind. Intense stress reactions after extreme experiences were described under various names until the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder was formalised in diagnostic manuals.

Most authors distinguish between the traumatic event itself and the way the person lives through it. Two people exposed to the same event may react very differently, since factors such as social support, age, previous experiences or a sense of control all play a role. A simple example is someone who survives a road accident and months later keeps replaying the scene in dreams or avoids driving without being able to explain why.

Today the debate centres on the limits of the concept, so that normal reactions are not pathologised, and on the significance of cumulative or relational trauma in childhood, as well as on research into effective treatments.