Does the body keep the score? The currently popular somatic theory of trauma — that the body stores undischarged energy and that therapy should release this emotional blockage — is essentially a return to Freud’s early theory of catharsis.  Freud abandoned that model when he discovered that symptoms are not residues of trapped energy but disguised formations of thought, the signifiers of an unconscious discourse.  With this shift, psychoanalysis was born: from a hydraulic model of release to a hermeneutic practice of listening.

The somatic view of trauma thus has a long lineage, but the real question is this: is trauma an excess of feeling, or a failure of meaning?