”23 Janet described how the memories of these traumas tended to return not as stories of what had happened: they were reenacted in the form of intense emotional reactions, aggressive behavior, physical pain, and bodily states that could all be understood as the return of elements of the

traumatic experience. Janet first observed that traumatized patients seemed to react to reminders of the trauma with responses that had been relevant to the original threat, but that currently had no adaptive value. Upon exposure Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to reminders, the trauma was reactivated in the form of images, feelings, and physical sensations related to the trauma.21 He proposed that when patients fail to integrate the traumatic experience into the totality of their personal awareness, they seem Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to develop problems assimilating new experiences as well. It is … as if their personality

has definitely stopped at a certain point, and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements.“23 ”All (traumatized) patients seem to have had the evolution of their lives checked; they are attached to an insurmountable obstacle.“24 Janet proposed that the efforts to keep the fragmented traumatic memories out Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of conscious awareness eroded the psychological energy of these patients. This, in turn, interfered with the capacity to engage in focused action and to learn from experience. Unless the dissociated elements of the trauma were integrated into personal consciousness, the patient was likely to experience a

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical slow decline in personal and JNK-IN-8 purchase occupational functioning.25 As a young physician, during the 1880s, Sigmund Freud did two clinical rotations at the Salpêtrière in Paris. Upon his return to Vienna he attached himself to an older internist, Jospeh Breuer, with whom he started to carefully study the symptoms of ”hysterical“ patients, and the origins of their symptoms, which were often characterized by marked motoric and sensory abnormalities. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical They summarized their first set of findings in a paper entitled On the Physical Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena.76 these Because of the astuteness of their observations it is useful to quote part of their account: The … memory of the trauma … acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must be regarded as an agent that is still at work. At first sight it seems extraordinary that events experienced so long ago should continue to operate so intensely – that their recollection should not be liable to the wearing away process to which, after all, we see all our memories succumb. The following considerations may perhaps make this a little more intelligible. The fading of a memory or the losing of its affect depends on various factors.