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Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event. A traumatic event involves a singular experience or enduring event or events that completely overwhelm the individual's ability to cope or integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience. Trauma can be caused by a wide variety of events, but there are a few common aspects. It usually involves a complete feeling of helplessness in the face of a real or subjective threat to life, bodily integrity, or sanity. There is frequently a violation of the person's familiar ideas about the world, putting the person in a state of extreme confusion and insecurity. This is often seen when people or institutions depended on for survival violate or betray the person in some unforseen way.
==Trauma in psychoanalysis==
French neurologist [[Jean-Martin Charcot]] argued that psychological trauma was the origin of all instances of the mental illness known as [[hysteria]]. Charcot's "traumatic hysteria" often manifested as a paralysis that followed a physical trauma, typically years later after what Charcot described as a period of "incubation" {{ref|. [[Sigmund Freud]], Charcot}}'s student and the father of [[psychoanalysis]], examined the concept of psychological trauma throughout his career. [[Jean Laplanche]] has given a general description of Freud's understanding of trauma, which varied significantly over the course of Freud's career: "An event in the subject's life, defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organisation".
[[Sigmund FreudCategory:Psychoanalysis]], Charcot's student and the father of [[psychoanalysisCategory:Freudian psychology]], examined the concept of psychological trauma throughout his career. [[Jean Laplanche]] has given a general description of Freud's understanding of trauma, which varied significantly over the course of Freud's career: "An event in the subject's life, defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organisation" {{ref|traumadef}}.
