In 2012, I described Krystal’s (2002) seminal psychiatric work on “traumatic memories,” where he points out that because the registration of the traumatic state is on a preverbal, sensorimotor level, no language is available for the presentation of the memory:
Traumatic memories are not repressed in the ordinary sense of the word. Something worse happens to them. They are repudiated. . . . Some traumatic perceptions are not compatible with the survival of the self and are never registered consciously or in a form that is recoverable by any normal means; and these are the memories that cannot be remembered or forgotten. It is not just because the past involved enforced passivity, submission, and surrender, but because the emotional regression to certain infantile forms of relatedness causes an evocation of the infantile and childhood trauma encapsulated within their memories of the major trauma. (Krystal, 2002, p. 217, italics added)
Schore, Allan N.. Right Brain Psychotherapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) (pp. 45-46). W. W. Norton & Company. 2019, Kindle edition.
Cf.
Krystal, H. (2002). What cannot be remembered or forgotten. In J. Kauffman (Ed.), Loss of the assumptive world: A theory of traumatic loss (pp. 213–219). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
