psychic trauma is a metaphor don't forget that

Freud's original exposition of trauma (in Studies on Hysteria) was when a portion of the psychic/affective-relational (memory) network "splits off" from the rest. so it's a metaphor (trauma) on top of a metaphor (psyche as "circuit")

if you critique trauma from a phenomenological stance, Freud's metaphors explode: the "latent" psyche only exists if you consider memory as a static, spatial phenomenon and not if you take a temporal perspective

phenomenologically, what you have is an endless, almost rhythmic repetition of certain highly emotional image-fantasies triggered by associations. the tension here is that "repressed memories" created by trauma theoretically "do not show themselves" ...

so the problem becomes "how to convince myself that repressed memories even real?" and the way seems to be free association/immediate expression, which creates "irrational" seeming "paths around" the repressed thing easily visible to observers but not to you

it's fun to journal freely like this and then go back to your old journals and "read between the lines", that gives me a sense of "what was I avoiding?"

but someone on twitter almost certainly can't pull this off