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If, as we know, the essence of trauma, setting aside its characteristics as a phenomenon, consists in not having found thoughts or words to represent it: if, that is, the path for working through it is by definition closed off, repetition is all that is left for expressing the unconscious of those who have suffered a trauma. This is a failure of, and at the same time an attempt at, symbolisation.
On the one hand it is a failure of symbolisation because, however many different guises repetition may adopt in each of us - for the most part these are actions, but sometimes they are silences instead, or words, ideas too, even theories, or feelings, sometimes passions, as well as dreams, naturally - nevertheless repetition invariably maintains the quality of an act. And, as such, it just as invariably induces a complete arrest of the passing of time. We might say it
* Review translated by Adam Elgar.
murders its flow, and we might say it subverts the polychrony of psychic reality, turning it into indeterminate time.
But, on the other hand, it is an attempt, even if abortive, at symbolisation because, although by itself it is unable to undo the traumatic perception, it is in every case the expression of the vital part that remains in spite of the trauma. It is a guarantee of the existence - and resistance - of the Ego and the object, despite coming at the high cost of exchanging life for survival. It thus secures the future of life. Therefore, while in one respect it indicates an obstacle to the possibility of working through, in another respect, by ensuring survival, it leaves the door open to the potential for meaning. It ceaselessly insists on the object, with the unconscious and ambivalent aim of recovering mnestic traces that may in the end be reunited with the representable - if we want to express it from the perspective of the drives. Or, if we prefer to adopt a relational view, it may reclaim the dead and deadly areas of the personality, for someone who is finally g