Flashback

Within the depth-psychology and trauma corpus, ‘flashback’ occupies a uniquely contested theoretical position: it is simultaneously a neurobiological event, a phenomenological intrusion, a failure of narrative integration, and — in at least one innovative strand of somatic imagination work — a therapeutic instrument. Van der Kolk establishes the phenomenological stakes with characteristic force: unlike a discrete traumatic event, a flashback carries no temporal boundary, no beginning or end that would permit the mind to locate it safely in the past. Ogden and her collaborators ground this observation in neuroimaging, demonstrating that subjects who flashback engage a fundamentally different neural architecture — right-hemisphere, sensory, non-verbal — than those who recall trauma as ordinary autobiographical memory. The thalamic ‘shutdown’ documented in this literature explains why flashback content arrives as fragmentary sensation rather than narrative. Herman contextualizes flashbacks within the political economy of testimony: survivors may deliberately sustain them as acts of fidelity to the lost. Rothschild offers close clinical process material on interrupting flashbacks in real time, while Bosnak takes the most audacious position, proposing the deliberate induction of an ‘artificial flashback’ as a metabolizing intervention. Pargament’s clinical vignette illustrates adaptive religious coping during flashback episodes. Across these positions, the animating tension is whether the flashback represents pathological fixation or an arrested, potentially completable, act of integration.

In the library 11 passages

Flashbacks and reliving are in some ways worse than the trauma itself. A traumatic event has a beginning and an end — at some point it is over. But for people with PTSD a flashback can occur at any time, whether they are awake or asleep.

Van der Kolk argues that flashbacks are phenomenologically more destructive than the original trauma precisely because they lack temporal boundedness, trapping the sufferer in an open-ended loop of re-experiencing.

van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014thesis

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Reexperiencing traumatic events in the form of flashbacks is very different from the recall of events as ordinary autobiographical memories. Flashbacks most often occur spontaneously, triggered by internal or external events.

Ogden establishes the neuroimaging basis for the qualitative distinction between flashback re-experiencing and normal autobiographical recall, linking differential hemispheric activation to the nature of traumatic memory retrieval.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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PTSD patients experience their traumatic memories as timeless, intrusive, sensory fragments that often cannot be expressed as a narrative, whereas people who have suffered a trauma but do not suffer from PTSD usually recall traumatic memories as an integrated whole.

Ogden synthesizes neuroimaging findings to explain why flashbacks present as non-verbal, sensory, and timeless rather than as integrable narrative — a direct consequence of differential neural network engagement in PTSD.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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Breakdown of the thalamus explains why trauma is primarily remembered not as a story, a narrative with a beginning middle and end, but as isolated sensory imprints: images, sounds, and physical sensations that are accompanied by intense emotions.

Van der Kolk identifies thalamic shutdown during flashback as the neurobiological mechanism responsible for the fragmentary, sensation-dominated, non-narrative quality of traumatic re-experiencing.

van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014thesis

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G: slipping back into the flashback He’s drunk…. He’s coming towards me…. T: Greg! … Sometimes it is necessary to shout to get the attention of someone during a flashback. Flashbacks tend to be very loud and often the person cannot hear the therapist.

Rothschild’s verbatim clinical transcript demonstrates the phenomenological absorption of flashback states and the active, present-moment interventions required to interrupt re-experiencing and restore orientation.

Rothschild, Babette, The body remembers Volume 2, Revolutionizing trauma, 2024thesis

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I concluded that it was not necessary to wait for a dream, but that the same effect could be achieved by leading people into an artificial flashback.

Bosnak proposes that the metabolizing work of imagination — otherwise accomplished spontaneously in healthy post-traumatic dreaming — can be harnessed therapeutically through deliberate induction of an artificial flashback.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis

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The symptoms may be a symbolic means of keeping faith with a lost person, a substitute for mourning, or an expression of unresolved guilt. In the absence of a socially meaningful form of testimony, many traumatized people choose to keep their symptoms.

Herman argues that flashbacks can acquire meaning as acts of witness or fidelity, such that survivors may actively sustain them in the absence of adequate social containers for testimony.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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G: It controls me? T: Correct. And that’s the thing with those kind of memories, they feel like they control you… I’m quite confident that I can help you turn it around so that you can control the memory yourself.

Rothschild frames clinical work with flashback as a process of restoring the client’s agency over intrusive memory — shifting from helpless absorption to deliberate, self-regulated engagement.

Rothschild, Babette, The body remembers Volume 2, Revolutionizing trauma, 2024supporting

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In the midst of a panic attack or flashback to the accident, we found that Bob was helped by repeating a simple prayer to himself: ‘God is with me.’

Pargament documents religious coping as a practical resource for interrupting flashback states, illustrating how spiritual practice can serve a grounding and orienting function during acute re-experiencing.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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Triggers are normal. Symptoms are a wise communication, conveying what we’ve been through and how we learned to cope… triggers are similar to our nudges, calling for our attention.

Clayton reframes triggering — the precipitant of flashback — as meaningful somatic communication rather than pathological symptom, situating it within a broader paradigm of embodied self-knowledge.

Clayton, Ingrid, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, 2025aside

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The flashback humanizes the victim, while the simile’s image of a poplar laid low alongside water circles back to the circumstances of the birth and naming of Simoeisios.

Lattimore employs ‘flashback’ in its narratological rather than clinical sense, noting its humanizing function as a literary device in the Iliad — a usage that marks the term’s wider application beyond psychopathology.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside

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