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Literary trauma theorist Cathy Caruth’s most recent work, Listening to Trauma, does exactly that in each of the thirteen interviews Caruth thoughtfully conducts with leaders in the field of trauma work. The collection offer readers a chance to see familiar psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists in a new light, one that explores various ways of listening, illuminating different pathways towards recovery. Nowhere else in Caruth’s work, nor in trauma studies as it exists within the academy, has there been a work that attempts to perform the very ideas it theorizes by practicing them on its pages. Moreover, the text furthers the performative aspect of trauma studies by foregrounding the physicality of trauma, both as it is experienced by the sufferer and also in the practitioner’s treatment of it. Throughout these conversations, Caruth performs one of the central ideas discussed in the book, that is, the imperative of the analyst to co-create knowledge of the analysand’s experience of past trauma while at the same time maintaining the boundaries between analyst and analysand. As an extension of the contact-oriented space she foregrounds within theories of trauma treatment, Caruth makes explicit the materiality of trauma through an emphasis on trauma’s inscriptions on the body. This material aspect of trauma comes to the fore in interviews with several respected practitioners and theorists representing myriad fields including neurology, anthropology, literary criticism, and film, among others.
In her interviews, Caruth re-creates the analytic scene of listening. Caruth’s rapport with and attunement to the other allows for a dialectical emergence of knowledge, one that principally emanates from the interviewee, but is also shaped by Caruth’s comments and questions. Observing this practice, the reader gains critical insight into what it means to be a trauma scholar in one’s own field – actively engaged, even if s/he is not a practitioner in the clinical sense. For examp