This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Return of Images After a Stress Film

Mardi J. Horowitz, MD

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1969;20(5):552-559.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

SOME PERSONS who experience psychic trauma report that memories of the precipitating event intrusively enter their awareness long after the traumatic event takes place. Such clinical observations have led to the theory that there is a compulsion to re-enact traumas, perhaps as a belated attempt at mastery. This paper reports an experimental study of this theory in which a stressful film induced subsequent unbidden images in volunteer subjects.

The Repetition of Psychic Trauma.— Freud and Breuer¹ described psychic trauma as an event in which perceptual and affective stimuli overwhelm the processes that ordinarily bind them and maintain homeostasis. These stimuli tend to return to mind, sometimes as visual images. In the "Project for a Scientific Psychology,''² Freud calls such vivid images ``untamed memories." When affects associated with the trauma are worked through, the memories become "tamed"; that is, reduced in intensity and sensory quality. But, if conflict interferes . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
San Francisco

From the Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication Jan 8, 1969.

Reprint requests to Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center, 1600 Divisadero St, San Francisco 94115.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?