I will not attempt to win your delight and will not be concerned about whether I will gain your love. Since I am now totally attached to you, I should tell you the truth. I came to your office and was unable to make eye contact. You immediately knew how distressed I was by my difficulty meeting your gaze. It always turns out that I had been laughing with you, full of tender feelings, and I gained your elation which made me feel loved. I miss you, every second, every minute in every day. I dream of you, every second, every minute at every night. It never occurred to me that survivors of chronic trauma had a different activation of the prefrontal cortex in response to a direct eye gaze. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) normally helps us to assess the person coming towards us, and our minor neurons help to pick up his intentions.  The intellectual achievements as such belong to the same psychic forces as are responsible for all such achievements during the day. We are probably much too inclined to overestimate the conscious character even of intellectual and artistic production. The most essential and original part of my creations came to me in the form of inspirations and offered itself to my awareness in an almost completed states. In other cases, where there is a concerted effort of all the psychic forces, there is nothing strange in the fact that conscious activity, too, lends assistance. However, people with post-traumatic stress disorder, it is the much-abused privilege of conscious activity to hide from us all other activities wherever it participates. People with post-traumatic stress disorder do not activate any part of their frontal lobe, which means they could not muster any curiosity about the stranger. The just reacted with intense activation deep inside their emotional brains, in the primitive areas known as the Periaqueductal Gray, which generates startle, hypervigilance, cowering, and other self-protective behaviors. There is no activation of any part of the brain involved in social engagement. In response to being looked at they simply go into survival mode.  

It hardly seems worthwhile to take up the historical significance of dreams as a separate theme. Where, for instance, a leader has been impelled by a dream to engage in a bold undertaking, the success of which has had the effect of changing history, a new problem arises only so long as the dream is regarded as a mysterious power and contrasted with other more familiar psychic forces. What does this mean for the ability of people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder to make friends and get along with others? How do they go about healing? The problem disappears as soon as we regard the dream as a form of expression for impulses to which a resistance was attached during the way, whilst at night one is able to draw reinforcement from deep-lying sources of excitation. To have genuine relationships one has to be able to experience others as separate individuals, each with their own particular motivation and intentions.  While one is required to stand up for oneself, one must also recognize that other people have their own agendas. Trauma can make all that hazy and gray. The roots of resilience are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other. However, the greatest respect with which the ancient peoples regarded dreams and life is based on just a piece of psychological divination. It is a homage paid to the unsubdued and indestructible element in the human soul, to the daemonic power which furnishes the dream-wish, and which we have found again in our unconscious for what we so call does not coincide with the unconscious of the philosophers.  From dreams, the unconscious—and hence all that is psychic—occurs as a function of two separate systems, and that as such it occurs even in normal psychic life. 

The city was full of disturbed and disturbing people. They were wild creatures who could not sit still and who hit and bit other people, and sometimes even the staff. They would run up to you and cling to you one moment and run away, terrified, the next. Some masturbated compulsively; other lashed out at objects, people, pets, and themselves. They were at once starving for affection and angry and defiant. Some were painfully complaint. None of them seemed able to explore or play in ways that was typical for people their age. Some of them had hardly developed a sense of self—they could not even recognize themselves in a mirror. They find it difficult to ascribe any function to consciousness; it appeared to them a superfluous mirroring of the completed psychic process. By means of perceptions of pleasure and pain, it influences the course of the cathexes within the psychic apparatus, which otherwise operates unconsciously and by the displacement of quantities. The automatic rule of the primary pain principle, together with the limitation of function capacity bound up with it, is broken by the sensory regulations, which are themselves again automatisms. We find repression, which, though originally expedient, nevertheless finally brings about a harmful lack of inhibition and of psychic control, overtakes memories much more easily than it does perceptions, because in the former there is no additional cathexis from the excitation of the psychic sense-organs.  One boy at their school threw gasoline at a classmate and set him on fire. Another boy was caught in crossfire while walking to school with his father and a friend. He was wounded in the groin, and his friend was killed. Given their exposure to such high baseline level violence, the censorship had been hoodwinked so successfully that under the mask of an innocent father and son, a phantasy was admitted to consciousness which otherwise would have remained in the preconscious.