Peter A. Levine - Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past: A Practical Guide forUnderstanding and Working with Traumatic Memory

The study of traumatic memories has a long and venerable pedigree in psychology and psychiatry. It goes back at least to Paris in the 1870s, when Jean-Martin Charcot, the father of neurology, became fascinated with the question of what caused the paralyses, jerky movements, swooning, sudden collapse, frenzied laughter, and dramatic weeping in the hysterical patients on the wards of the hospital of the Salptrire. Charcot and his students gradually came to understand that these bizarre movements and body postures were the physical imprints of trauma.

In 1889, Charcots student Pierre Janet wrote the first book on what we now would call PTSD, Lautomatisme psychologique, in which he argued that trauma is held in procedural memoryin automatic actions and reactions, sensations and attitudes, and that trauma is replayed and reenacted as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), body movements, or visual images (nightmares and flashbacks). Janet put the issue of memory front and center in dealing with trauma: An event only becomes a trauma when overwhelming emotions interfere with proper memory processing. Afterward, traumatized patients react to reminders of the trauma with emergency responses appropriate to the original threat, but these reactions now are completely out of placelike ducking in panic under the table when a drinking glass falls on the floor, or going into a rage when a child starts crying.

For well over a century we have understood that the imprints of trauma are stored not as narratives about bad things that happened

Janet also noted that traumatized people get stuck in the past: They become obsessed with the horror they consciously want to leave behind, but they keep behaving and feeling as if it is still going on. Unable to put the trauma behind them, their energy is absorbed by keeping their emotions under control at the expense of paying attention to the demands of the present. Janet and his colleagues learned from bitter experience that the traumatized women under their care could not be cured by reasoning or insight, behavior modification or punishment, but that they did respond to hypnotic suggestion: Trauma could be resolved by reliving the events in a hypnotic trance state. By safely replaying the old events in their minds and then constructing an imaginary satisfactory conclusionsomething they had been unable to do during the original event because they had been too overwhelmed by helplessness and horrorthey could begin to fully realize that they had, in fact, survived the trauma and could resume their lives.