The theme of The Site's last London conference was ‘Psychoanalysis and Class’ (Sitegeist: Number 3, Autumn 2009). All the contributors to the conference spoke of the invisibility, elision, or avoidance of class in the psychoanalytic discourse. Our last conference, at our site in the South West, took the environment as its theme, in a different way a topic neglected in psychoanalysis (Sitegeist: Number 7, Spring 2012). Trauma, on the other hand, seems to be everywhere. Reflecting an omnipresence of the term in the zeitgeist, it has become a hot topic in the therapeutic world. The term, from once having quite a specific meaning for Freud in his exposition of psychosexuality and of the development of neurosis, has broadened and extended to become almost empty of meaning. It has followed a trajectory from medicine (where it simply connotes the Greek for ‘wound’) through psychology and psychoanalysis, terminating so far in a current socio-cultural framework of meaning. In this edition of Sitegeist, we reproduce the majority of the papers from our conference on trauma in London this year. All the papers here tease out, in different ways, some of resonances and significances of the trajectory of how trauma is understood, whilst interrogating its usefulness for contemporary psychoanalysis.
Our age of 24 hour rolling news broadcasts, which have to be filled with both words and pictures, creates a demand and on the part of some, an appetite, for trauma. Nothing fits the bill better than a narrative of traumatised victims setting out their stories. It also means we are all to a small extent and vicariously exposed to trauma. As a society, we experience what the academic James Thomas, quoted in a Guardian article on the 5th anniversary of Diana's death, called ‘grief without the pain’.
George Eliot describes the human condition thus:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar that lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (1871: 226)
It is ironic, although perhaps in accordance with Freud's pleasure principle, that traumatic happenings are precisely those that break through the wadding of necessary stupidity, as we shall discover in these papers; yet today's society has made of the concept of trauma only further wadding for our over-stuffed societal stupidity. Our conference this year presented a diversity of accounts of trauma, reflecting the diversity of approach that characterises The Site itself. This raises the question: how are we to reconcile conflicting explanations of the topic? My answer is that we do not need to. Rather, we should try to take each paper on its own terms and listen to its insights.
The concept of trauma has perhaps now been around long enough for a revisionist stance to form, and perhaps we are setting one out here. Our title points to a paradox: some of those who experience or have experienced trauma never speak of it and wish only to forget. This is often characteristic of traumatized groups within nation states, victims of genocide or campaigns of politically motivated disappearance, imprisonment and torture. There is a plethora of evidence from both those who directly experienced such events and their children that maintaining silence about what happened can have terrible psychological consequences. I am thinking, of course, first of the Shoah survivors and their children. Psychoanalysts like Abraham and Torok in their book The Shell and the Kernel have elaborated a theory of the transmission of unmetabolised trauma from one generation to the next. To trace the cataclysmic effects of the Holocaust, of Rwanda, of any of the other modern horrors seems to me a task we
should not draw back from. The other face of the paradox is those who feel compelled to speak out and endlessly repeat their trauma in the form of painful symptoms and suffering. These are more often individual and isolated victims, who may feel singled out: unlucky victims of a cruel blow of fate. Both of these trajectories are laden with pain and share many characteristics in common.
Where the term ‘trauma’ has been so over-extended, it becomes necessary to question its applications and deployment. Here we come to revisionism. Various important questions need to be asked. Paul Verhaeghe (2001) usefully contrasts accidental and structural trauma. The latter is the kind of trauma Freud had in mind as constitutive of the subject (broadly, the incursion of sexuality in the child's life). Can we think of this universal experience of trauma in the same way as accidental trauma? Do individual experiences of accidental trauma, say an assault or car accident, have the same kinds of effects on people as those experienced by a whole community or group? What of severity? Are there some traumas that would be universally and wholly destructive of the subject, and to the same extent, regardless of individual make-up? What of PTSD? For some in the psy. field, this is all we mean by trauma; the two are synonymous. Is this so or should we be seeing it as a prefabricated template imposed on those we presume to think of in this category? Above all, what is the contribution of psychoanalysis to those who suffer as a result of trauma? How should we approach the work with these suffering subjects?
One of the vectors dividing psychoanalytic theories on trauma is the significance attached to causal events. Drawing on Verhaeghe's distinction, Barry Watt's paper ‘Whose Drive is it Anyway?’ shows that the causality of events is not to be taken for granted. His closely argued paper on trauma and tragedy never loses touch with the clinic. As he remarks, there is no co-relation between the severity of the event and the intensity and duration of symptoms produced. The dichotomy, as he shows, is not complete. Foucault wrote of the event as ‘a wound, a victory-defeat, death’ produced entirely by a collision, mingling and separating of bodies, and yet intangible, forming an endless incorporeal battle. In spite of this, he writes, events are ‘without thickness, mixture or passion; for this reason, they can no longer be causes’. Rather, he goes on, they constitute ‘a point…of which someone speaks and which roams the surface of things” (1970: 173-4). It is precisely those events roaming the surface of things which impel subjects to speak of their trauma, or to attempt it. We might say that here the devil is in the detail; it is the detail which haunts. Watt goes on to think about what in human existence might give the possibility of not being overwhelmed by trauma, and concludes that assuming agency, and a therapeutic technique that encourages it, is the key.
Jane Haynes' paper ‘Out of the Blue’ centres on the experience of traumatic events, their life-changing nature, their suddenness and, like Watt, their shared nature. Her brave and unique account of firstly her own experience of the murder of her son-in-law and then of the way the knowledge of this happening impacted the therapy with one of patients in particular raises important questions about the assumption of authority by the analyst. She took the rare step of writing a joint paper with an analysand, who gives his own account of how his knowledge of Haynes' experiences affected his life and the course of his analysis.
Another term which occurs in several of our papers is ‘representation’. Robert Weiss, in his paper ‘Between Experience and Representation : towards a semiotics of trauma’, directs us to think about the irreducible gap between the traumatic experience and the words used to describe it; or, in Freudian terms, the gap between word-presentation and thing-presentation. Drawing on Blanchot primarily, he lays out the dilemma: what can be said about trauma, when nothing can be said about trauma? The response to this, as he shows, is that it is possible to say something about the very absence, the lack. To speak about trauma is to create a form with the content elsewhere. One of his striking examples here is that of the war photographer Don McCullin, whose childhood exercise of scribbling on a sheet of paper taped to the wall would leave a remainder, the random crayon strokes which had strayed over the edges of the paper and encroached on the wall. As an adult he reflected on these images, seeing in them a potent expression of insistent lack. These considerations have important consequences for our clinical work with trauma. If trauma is unrepresentable in the consulting room, that does not mean it is not present in the speech of our analysands. Weiss evokes in an interesting way the concept of
neutrality; for him, the analytic work is suspended between activity/passivity, speech and silence, being and not being, and it is here that we will locate trauma.
Philip Hill invites us to think about trauma via analogies with evolutionary biology and immunology. Founded upon the Lacanian notion that trauma is the imposition of language on the subject, he delineates the way in which the agent of trauma is indeterminacy and uncertainty, a plurality of meanings, not the overwhelming insistence of the one set of events which characterizes trauma in another kind of formulation. Trauma in this orientation lies in every sentence, an exposure to the Tower of Babel. In another parallel, that between allergy and phobia, Hill sets out the way in which it is a harmless object which becomes an allergen or a phobic object: Little Hans' horse, for example. Again I am reminded of the clinical fact that invariably there is always a specific aspect of even the most terrible events which is experienced as traumatic, and beyond the merely dreadful. Thus, in amongst the awfulness of torture, rape or extreme violence, it may be some apparently more innocuous aspect which haunts the victim such as the rape victim who cannot stop thinking about how everyone saw the dingy underwear she was wearing.
Post-conference postscript: our original plan had been to make available on the day of the conference the text of the papers, to launch The Site's new on-line version of Sitegeist. The papers referred to above were submitted by their authors ahead of the conference, and we thank them very much for their co-operation. Now that our very first digital Sitegeist is ready, we include as well two excellent and enlightening papers presented at the conference by Dorothee Bonnigal-Katz: ‘From Leakage to Slippage: Trauma and Psychosis” and Brid Greally ‘Trauma and the Ghost Dance of Psychoanalytic Practice’. Sadly, we could not include the paper given by our guest speaker, Karl Figlio, which is being published elsewhere. We would like to thank him for his warmly received paper, as well as Philip Derbyshire who was his discussant, and who initiated a lively discussion.