Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film explores an intriguing facet of human behaviour not yet examined in its own right: an individual or a group may contrive unawares to repeat a half-forgotten traumatic experience in disguise. Such reliving has shaped major careers and large-scale events throughout history. Insight into traumatic reliving is, therefor, vital for understanding historica causation past and present. The phenomenon has also proliferated in literature since antiquity and, more recently, in film, indicating its tacit acceptance as a piece of life by the reading and movie-going public. The author examines the evidence of history, literature, and film on how this irrational behavioural mechanism works. The book begins with a brief introduction, situating the reliving of trauma in the context of the varieties of reliving that pervade the natural and human worlds. There follows a discussion of psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and trauma theories. Next, the author draws on his own and others' monographic research on traumatic reliving by historic individuals and groups in an effort to define its normal course and typical features. This summary overview is followed by a new, detailed case study of the traumatic fall of the Third French Republic as it was relived through the fall of the Fourth. Moving from history to literature, an examination of six representative classics from Euripides to lbsen shows that the motif of traumatic reliving is recurrent in fiction over the centuries, albeit mostly confined to individual reliving. Finally, to cinema, which, with its quick cuts and flashbacks, is uniquely well suited to convey the experience of traumatic reliving, and where again individual reliving predominates. The basic pattern in literature and on screen closely parallels that found in history. This book is a first step in an exciting new direction of research and analysis. --Book Jacket.