The word 'trauma' comes from Greek, meaning 'wound' and is derived from the term 'to pierce'. Trauma generally means "an injury where the skin is broken as a consequence of external violence".
According to Freud's paper 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', any stimulus which disturbs the subject's initial position could be considered as 'violating' and the experience of this situation as 'traumatic'. In the process of philogenetic evolution, in every new stage, the subject tends to return to the previous position, and lastly to an inorganic form. This tendency is generated by the drives which are serving a single force ruling all the psychic system: the death instinct.
Applying metapsychological approaches to Rorschach, it could be considered that every Rorschach experience is traumatic for the subject to a certain degree, as he/she has to be confronted the Rorschach cards and to experience the situation. If the effect of the Rorschach experience is felt to be too traumatic, we would expect to see a break in the system called 'perception-consciousness' which puts the primitive defenses in process - and through the hole that is pierced by the stimulus of Rorschach, we would be able to see the archaic darkness and primitive parts of the self.
In this study, to see more exaggerated traumatic effects, we chose to apply Rorschach to two subjects who are both victims of war trauma and have battlefield experience. We tried to have a look at these subjects' highly disturbed psyches and see the effects of the trauma.