In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud defines the trauma as the stimuli and excitations from outside that are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. In Lacanian terms, it can be translated into a breach of the symbolic system of representation, resulting in the production of the traumatic real. Generally speaking, the Lacanian real is an effect of symbolization that can not nevertheless be reducible to the symbolic order. Accordingly, the traumatic real can be looked upon as an effect of a negative/traumatic symbolization, which has to do with the breach of the symbolic system of representation. The traumatic event constitutes a liminal case in which the victim is situated in what Freud terms ‘anti-thetical representation,’ exposed to the ‘unrepresented’ ‘unsymbolized’ ‘unintegrated’ ‘unprocessed’ ‘unassimilated’'unclaimed’ experience, as the theoreticians of trauma name variously. It is worth noting that the traumatic real ungendered in the wake of the traumatic event is closely related to the activation of what Freud calls Todestrieb(death drive). This accounts for the way in which the victims of trauma are disintegrated sexually and/or aggressively, exposed to some derailments and transgressions. According to Triebmischung, the two classes of drive may be fused into sadism and/or masochism. Lacanian psychoanalysis can be defined as a way of working on the traumatic real by means of the symbolic, or a way of speaking the unspeakable through the medium of the signifier. Otherwise put, the analytic cure is an attempt to have an impact on affect by means of representation, thus changing the subject of jouissance via the subject of the signifier. It is only the signifier itself, the very tool of disintegration that can heal the wound it incises into the traumatic real, much like the way in which “only the spear that smote you, can heal your wound” as in Wagner’s Parsifal.
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