From Trauma to Writing. A Viewpoint on Herta Müller's Literary Creation by Radu Clit

Radu Clit is a Romanian psychoanalyst who lives in Paris, France, since 1993. In 1999, he received his PhD from the Sorbonne, with the paper “Totalitarian Framework and Narcissistic Functioning”, published in Romania in 2004. His most recent work, “From Trauma to Writing. A Viewpoint on Herta Müller's Literary Creation”, was written in 2018, and the author translated it into Romanian and published it in Romania in 2019. There is a relationship of continuity between the two books, with the second work being constructed as a case study, an exemplification - through the literary creation of a great writer, Herta Müller - of the concepts of trauma, narcissistic functioning and totalitarian societies presented in his first book.

The title of the book - “From Trauma to Writing. A Viewpoint on Herta Müller's Literary Creation” - necessarily requires an introduction to the writer whose work the book is about, Herta Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Herta Müller was born and lived in Romania, in the Swabian community of Timişoara. In 1987, she immigrated to Germany. Her entire work, from her early novels to novellas and essays, describes life under the totalitarian regime, the characteristics of the communist society in Romania and the tragic fate of the people who lived in those times. They are works of fiction, but inspired by real situations that occurred in the writer's life and contain autobiographical elements.

The book's title suggests the working hypothesis from which Radu Clit started: can writing heal the traumas someone has suffered? To what extent does this form of symbolization, i.e. writing,

reproduce and preserve, as faithfully as possible, the treated experiences or to what extent does it modify them? What happens to traumas that go beyond the individual and become collective, traumas specific to a totalitarian society, such as the communist Romania in which the t