As Chance Would Have It: Freud and Kierkegaard on Repetition and Trauma.

Sigmund Freud and Søren Kierkegaard using completely different categories addressed the concept of trauma and what it means to move past it. Trauma removes us from representative time or the time of ongoing human projects and instead deposits its victim in what has been called anarchic time a beginning that never proceeds toward a future. These events are not known; they are instead compulsively repeated. The challenge for treatment is returning patients to ongoing narrative time where the trauma can be left behind. This proves to be an unpredictable process in which analysts must not only use but rely on their mistakes to create tensions whereby they become witnesses to what patients cannot represent. Kierkegaard's repetition tells us therapy tries to return an actual event to the status of what is future or merely possible in which case it can be repeated as something different than before. Kierkegaardian repetition makes the analyst into a narrator with whose story the patient may identify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]