In their presentation, “On Trauma,” Drs. Betsy Brett and Sid Phillips will explore how Freud tried to understand where emotional and psychological problems come from. From early on, he asked whether people’s symptoms grow mainly out of painful life experiences (trauma) or out of inner conflicts and instinctual wishes (drives), and he described these questions using ideas about how mental energy is organized in conscious and unconscious life. Over the years he repeatedly revised how he thought these inner processes work and how they relate to the causes of suffering. This presentation will focus on why those debates still matter in the consulting room today—especially whether problems rooted in trauma differ in important ways from those rooted in inner conflict, and whether each may call for a different therapeutic approach. Rich, detailed clinical examples will illustrate these ideas and show how they play out in therapeutic encounters