excitation. Is he then implying some close relationship or even identity between consciousness and trauma? Third, Freud’s proposal that repetition is a matter of binding free flow of excitation leaves an explanatory gap. On the one hand he gives a mechanical explanation of the nature of binding:
We infer that a system which is itself highly cathected is capable of taking up an additional stream of fresh inflowing energy and of converting it into quiescent cathexis, that is of binding it psychically. The higher the system’s own quiescent cathexis, the greater seems to be its binding force; conversely, therefore, the lower its cathexis, the less capacity will it have for taking up inflowing energy.
(1920g: 30)
Trauma occurs when the system’s “own quiescent cathexis” is insufficient to cope with unusually large inflows of excitation. But, we may well ask, how does repetition – for example (Freud’s own example), the repetition of a traumatic experience in dreams – help to establish this missing quiescent cathexis?
As already seen, Freud emphasises, in his account of consciousness, that no part of the mental apparatus is exposed directly to the external world. Certainly, the outer layer of the apparatus is exposed to quantities of excitation greater than those which penetrate to inner layers (hence the obliteration of resistances between elements of the outer layer, enabling the free flow which generates consciousness). But, Freud says, the evolution of life forms since earliest times has created a “protective shield” around the apparatus as a whole (including the consciousness layer) that ensures its insulation from the “enormous energies at work in the external world”, by which the apparatus would otherwise “be killed” (1920g: 27). The sense organs can safely take small “samples“ of the external world”, which are conveyed through the shield by the nerves, but actual breach of the shield causes trauma.
By contrast, the mental apparatus receives excitation from the inside the body directly, without any shield, and this is possible without damage to the mental apparatus because the intensity of internal excitation is much lower than that of the excitations