Freud's unfortunates: reflections on haunted beings who know the disaster of severe trauma.

The forms of dissociation are multiplex and must include a type of dissociation that represents human beings' fundamental inability to process and represent severe trauma. This article posits a form of dissociation--resulting from trauma--linked to disastrous knowledge, signifying a person's incapacity to use language and symbol to organize the core of the traumatic experience in terms of semantically structured self-in-relation. Catastrophic knowledge of severe trauma is unexperienced experience that paradoxically stands for an indescribable core of an event that undermines self-in-relation and the concomitant capacities for language, narrative, and knowledge. This irretrievable unexperienced experience continues to haunt despite a person's recovery. This perspective points to the limits of therapy and the necessity to establish and maintain a relationship of trust and loyalty in the face of an event that annihilates self-in-relation. Included in this work are the therapeutic tasks of serving as a witness and a container of the unnamable horror.