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(Final version accepted 23 February 2009)
Surviving a major historical trauma has consequences that are difficult to live with. Survivors who remain silent are often condemned to a desiccated existence, a dried-out life, a death in life. Survivors who speak out run an even greater risk. Telling their ghastly tale may trigger somatic consequences, psychotic episodes, or even suicide. As to the psychoanalytic cure, the free association it requires carries its own danger: negative therapeutic reaction in sometimes extreme forms. Avoidance of horror may turn into avoidance of life itself. Awful as it may seem, this avoidance of life may represent a victory over a menacing chaos. Should we as analysts accept the risk of endangering such a victory, no matter how unsatisfactory? The psychoanalytical injunction to speak out may trigger an upsurge of shame and terror. Is subjectivation always possible? This paper is about what happens when denial and splitting strategies are suspended, when ‘crypts’ are opened. Is there an analytic ‘poros’ allowing for a controlled return of affects? Is there a therapeutic solution to the problem of telling a wreckage without being caught in it? The dangers of ‘telling’” will be discussed in regard to new analytic strategies and new interpretive registers. When the ‘silent psychic sharing’ proves insufficient, some analysts go so far as to take part in the shame, share the grief, ‘lend their own psyche’, become a ‘double’ of the analysand, accept the existence of ‘sanctuaries’. To what effect?