Dans la confrontation traumatique, il ne s’agit pas de rencontre, mais plutôt de face-à-face avec un irreprésentable qui échappe au langage et vient faire effraction dans la psyché. Le trauma engage ainsi une dimension de violence. Une observation clinique vient illustrer au travers d’un traumatisme de guerre la place que la violence peut occuper dans la clinique psychotraumatique, en étant le point à la fois redouté et invariablement recherché.

By its dimension of surprise, unpredictability and terror, the traumatic event confronts the subject with various situations in their details, but each involving the issue of death. In this confrontation, there is no meeting, but a face-to-face. Face-to-face with an irrepresentable which eludes language and common sense and breaks into the psyche. So trauma commits a dimension of violence by the rupture inscribed in the psychic economy of the subject. Destructive violence by the threat and the endangering of the sense of being, but also fascinating by creating an inseparable enjoyment. A clinical observation aimed at illustrating through a war psychic trauma dating from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia the place that violence can hold in the psycho-traumatic clinic, being the point at the same time feared and consistently sought in the relation to the world of the patient. A potential violence appears from the impasse of a dedifferentiation situation threatening the integrity of the subject, with the return of an indistinction between the inside and the outside, between the ego and the object, of which only violence will enable to get out by restoring a vital distance with the object by a sudden movement of separation such as an acting out. One of the issues of care emerged around the reinstatement of the subject in a more peaceful link to the other, by aiming at the removal of the deadly repetition of what has intruded without being named.