The theory of traumatic intervention is based in the idea that social performance is more than a consolidation of dynamic quality in static quality, it is a habituation of practice; a reification of norms and a solidification both of goals and of means of achieving them. Given the ‘realisation’ of social performance in static value patterns, a serious and traumatic psychological(/existential) intervention is required to ‘shake’ the subject from their solidified value patterns. Whatever intellectual framework one wishes to apply to Being, whether that of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche or Pirsig, only a traumatic intervention can free the subject to follow their process of individuation/re-establish dynamic value patterns/un-repress the id/‘become what one is’.

            The intervention will seek to dismantle the subject’s social performance in order to reveal to the subject the mutable, arbitrary, contingent and performative aspects of their solipsistic reality. Given that, as Ibsen said, “deprive man of his life lie and you rob him of his happiness”, the intervention will necessarily be traumatic for the subject. Everything they believe they know will be proven to them to be wrong. But once this has been achieved, they can recognise the possibility of other modes of Being, i.e. they can recognise both the contingency and the arbitrary nature of their performance, and of any performance. This in turn will allow the establishment of dynamic value patterns, while not denying the social, and personal, usefulness of static patterns. Following Pirsig, static patterns are necessary, but only as staging posts to further dynamic patterns.