Da Janet a Bromberg, passando per Ferenczi

The article considers which way psychoanalysis might have taken if, instead of the Freudian model of repression and a fantasmatic understanding of trauma, Janet’s model of dissociation and his “analytic psychology” had prevailed. One moment within this hystorical development in the theory and the treatment of trauma might be traced back to Ferenczi and his “fragmentation” model of the personality, as a direct consequence of trauma in the abused child. Freud and Ferecnzi notoriously disagreed on the ethiopatology of mental illness and the place to attribute to real trauma. Recent psychoanalytic developments in the theory and the clinical practice of trauma have signed a change in the direction of a relational, intersubjective dimension of the psychoanalytic practice, in which real trauma and dissociation have become prominent, as Bromberg’s theoretical and clinical studies exemplify.