Below is an excerpt from the article entitled: “Something Wicked This Way Comes: Trauma, Dissociation, and Conflict: The Space Where Psychoanalysis, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience Overlap” by Philip Bromberg, a leading figure in the world of trauma and psychoanalysis.  I share it to add texture and depth to the term trauma–a term often tossed around without precision or a shared understanding.  I’ll present some takeaways at the end of the post.  However, the story stands alone as a parable about trauma. When I was a kid, an endless source of fascination was looking out of my bedroom window at our backyard garden to silently observe the mysterious interactions between the animals, birds, trees, bushes and flowers.  But like the Garden of Eden, it received periodic visits from an infamous inhabitant of our neighborhood: A cat who was referred to by everyone in the vicinity as Adolf (I was a World War II kid). Adolf was an aggressive, predatory, seemingly fearless animal, whose viciousness and mean-temperedness terrorized the other neighborhood cats as well as most of …