It makes a hole in language. Freud's early erroneous idea that he had discovered the element of trauma in hysteria in premature sexual experience is re-evaluated by Lacan to argue that the assumption of sexuality is traumatic for all human subjects. Lacan says that Dora, the young homosexual woman, and Freud's nephew all manifest anxiety when they encounter a void place in the Other, showing a limit to thought that gives the sense of a meaning beyond meaning. Dora, when in a state of primal hysteria, depicts this dilemma which Lacan says is an identity problem caused by her not knowing what a woman is. Thus, Lacan gives a logic and a means to what is lacking in Freud's biological theories.
Symptoms substitute for something else.
When the young woman loses her place in her father's gaze, she attempts suicide. When the little boy loses his place in his mother's gaze, he cries before finding a replacement game as a solution to his trauma. Through an analysis of the signifier and its relation to traumatic repetition, this essay explores the necessity of psychoanalytic theory for an analysis of trauma. Because psychoanalysis is able to commemorate the traumatic missed encounter as the forgotten event, it is able to attend to the structural force of trauma without giving way to the temptation to idealize the experience as something untouchable or inaccessible. Such idealization, the essay claims, has been the tendency of some deconstructive theories of trauma that maintain that trauma is beyond the limits of representation and our symbolic periphery.