How a Failure to Symbolise Trauma Produces Dissociation and Repetition Compulsion: Toward an Integrated Psychoanalytic-Neurobiological Model of Psychic Trauma

Psychic trauma has long been understood, within the Janetian and Freudian traditions, as an experience that overwhelms the mind's capacity to symbolise: to transform raw sensory and affective excitation into image and word. Contemporary neuroscience has independently documented the biological mechanisms of an overwhelmed threat-response system, yet the psychoanalytic and neurobiological literatures on trauma have rarely been brought into sustained theoretical dialogue, and the psychoanalytic distinction between a primary register of symbolisation, the transformation of sensation into a first mental image, and a secondary register, the binding of image to word and narrative, has seldom been mapped onto distinct symptom domains. This paper undertakes that synthesis. Drawing on Janet's theory of dissociation, Freud's model of thing- and word-presentations, Roussillon's distinction between primary and secondary symbolisation, Bion's container-contained model of affect metabolisation, and the structural dissociation theory of van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and colleagues, alongside the neurobiological literatures on the fear circuitry, memory systems, hemispheric lateralisation, interoception, and the polyvagal architecture of defence, the paper proposes a double-dissociation model in which a failure of primary symbolisation is theorised to produce somatoform dissociation and dissociative amnesia, while a failure of secondary symbolisation is theorised to produce the compulsion to repeat. The paper further distinguishes somatoform dissociation from the neighbouring but conceptually distinct categories of psychosomatic disorder and somatoform disorder, addresses the unresolved question of whether symbolisation failure causes dissociation or dissociation forecloses symbolisation, and situates the model within the somatic idioms of distress documented in conflict-affected sub-Saharan African populations, including survivors of the ongoing Anglophone crisis in Cameroon. The model is offered as a testable theoretical framework, with specific, falsifiable predictions for future empirical research in trauma-exposed clinical populations.

Psychic Trauma; Symbolisation; Dissociation; Neurobiology; Psychoanalysis

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