Trauma, contingency, and the psychoanalytic zero (original) (raw)
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Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2010
Robert Stolorow describes his book Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Reflections (2007) as a "project (that) has occupied (him) now for more than 16 years" (p. 45) starting six months after the tragic death to metastatic cancer of his 34-year-old wife Daphne ("Dede") Stolorow, on February 23, 1991. His book exemplifies a value, deeply shared by the author and his late wife, that of "staying rooted in one's own genuine painful emotional experiences" (p. 46). The volume is very dense (50 pages of text, total), the product of 16 years of intense and sensitive reflection. It condenses in very short order the history of his intersubjective perspective on developmental trauma, (the outcome of invalidating malattunement in the "parent-child mutual regulation system" lending to unbearable affect states in search of a "relational home"), his theory of the phenomenology of trauma (the shattering of "absolutisms of everyday life"), trauma's temporality (trauma freeze frames the past and the future into an eternal present), and, finally an analysis of the ontological or universally constitutive aspect of trauma in our lives. This, he argues, following Heidegger (1927) is because we are always in a state of "Being-toward-Death." Much of the last half of his book is based on Heidegger's writings that are then woven into Stolorow's theory of trauma. In this latter manner, Stolorow conflates what has been commonly referred to as Heidegger's concept of "death anxiety" with his own conception of trauma, a controversial point to be addressed later in this review. All of the ideas Stolorow presents in this volume are autobiographically rooted in his examination of the traumatic and the enduring painful loss Dede's death has played in his life. His volume is an exegesis on how he came to terms with this deeply personal loss from which he arrives at a theoretical formulation axiomatic of certain universal propositions about trauma. In positing these universal ontological givens, Stolorow somewhat befuddles his previous intersubjective system theory regarding the uniqueness of human reactions, a position grounded in an epistemological stance of "perspectival realism" (Stolorow, Orange, & Atwood, 2002). This conundrum is amplified by his lack of commentary on what at times seem like contradictions between his earlier epistemological position and the current universalisms emergent in his ontological one in his efforts at delineating an original theory of traumatology.
Trauma, Healing and The Reconstruction Of Truth
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2014
The author analyzes recent developments in trauma theory, made necessary especially after the massive psychic traumas following World War II and the Shoah. The theories of Freud and Ferenczi are analyzed, especially, their different views of reality and their clinical attitude. When working with survivors of any trauma (from incest to genocide) it is necessary to reconstruct the historical details as carefully as possible, with the appropriate timing. Psychoanalysis is therefore viewed as an ethical and political practice similar to testimony, allowing the reconstruction of truth within the community and interrupting the cycle of the death instinct from one generation to the next.
International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2015
Extreme and complex traumatization represents a severe problem in today's world. Many traumatized persons and their families live under difficult conditions in refugee camps, shelters and in exile. Treatment and rehabilitation approaches need to take social and cultural conditions into consideration The paper will discuss how psychoanalytic therapy may be helpful for severely traumatized patients and what are the mechanisms of change in the therapeutic process. A focus is on how traumatic experiences are actualized in the transference and brings the analyst in a situation where enactments inevitably occur. It will be demonstrated how these processes may lead to symbolization of non-symbolized reminiscences of traumatic experiences. Psychoanalytic therapy with patient with complicated loss experiences will be analyzed and some conclusions based on this and others researched therapies will be discussed. The advantages of working with trauma-related material in the transference will be focused.
Chapter 2 Philosophies of Trauma
Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to fur...
INHERITED TRAUMATIC MEMORY: THE REPRESENTATION OF THE ATOMIC BOMB AS TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA
INTERSTUDIA, 2020
Trauma studies have has opened new paths in fiction to represent the sufferings of human beings. One of the issues that trauma studies discuss is the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Traumatic events are experienced by the victims, but their psychological impacts can be inherited by the next generations even if they do not experience the events at first hand. Therefore, transgenerational cycles of trauma become inevitable in the family. This study aims to explore how transgenerational trauma is represented and engaged via the character Hiroko and her son Raza in the novel Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie. The focus of the study is the representation of the traumas caused by atomic bombing and their physical and psychological transmissions to the next generations. The trauma of Hiroko, as the witness and survivor, is presented by exploring the traumatic memories of her haunted past. Being captive in her own traumas, the character cannot avoid passing on her traumas to her only child. The study focuses on the psychological impacts of atomic bomb trauma and its transmission to the offspring of the survivors.
We are all Located Somewhere: Thoughts on History, Trauma, and the Psychoanalytic process
Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 2019
This article honor's historian/psychoanalyst Tom Kohut's work by bringing forth the interpenetration of history, and psychoanalysis grounded in an empathic experiential method. Within the psychoanalytic process, the focus of empathic inquiry will now be informed by a radical contextual sensibility with the recognition that all dyadic experience cannot be understood outside of the contribution of the wider historical/cultural world within which that experience is embedded, a history that will inevitably include various forms of traumatizing violence. A clinical vignette is discussed in which empathic sensitivity to differences in economic privilege between therapist and patient tied to marked differences in respective historical location resulted in unusual therapist activity that evoked a special moment of meeting whereby the patient felt deeply understood. The chapter concludes with a sober reminder that the denigration of the other to inferior and subhuman status constitutes a slippery slope to genocide.
Trauma, Embodiment and Narrative
We do not always survive trauma. Elie Wiesel said of Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor who committed suicide at age sixty-seven, “[he] died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.” Though Levi physically survived the holocaust, psychically he did not. And yet, there are countless stories of incredible triumph over trauma. What makes survival possible? What seems to separate those who recover from those who do not—at least in part—is the capacity and opportunity for adaptation. Adaptation is the phenomenon whereby the subject is able to make use of one or more coping mechanisms in order to adjust to traumatic disruption. In this paper I argue that narrative is an especially useful tool for adapting to trauma because it addresses one of the things that is so disruptive about trauma: the inability to process the traumatic event.
Research in Phenomenology, 2000
Already for more than a century, the subject has recurrently died and come to life again upon the stage of philosophical thought. Even if it is incontestable that in the history of these reversals, the reborn subject is never quite the same as the one which disappeared, this survival gives cause for thought. Might it not, for example, lead us to think that the life of the subject consists precisely in surviving the dramas which ceaselessly menace its existence? That the subject, far from being sheltered from the threat of its disappearance, only experiences the need to affirm its existence in undergoing the ordeal of its possible disappearance? By this disappearance we do not mean physical death, but the abolition of subjective identity by an event which is non-appropriable and in consequence traumatising. I am a subject to the degree and so long as I resist my fading away. Being a subject would thus be a matter of being a subject by virtue of losses of identity and subsequent attempts to reconstitute a subjectivity, this subjectivity being henceforth no more than a vulnerable subjectivity, a wounded cogito. To say that this subject's rhythm of life is composed of the succession and perhaps even the simultaneity of events in which its identity is shattered and re-composed, does not, however, by any means demand that there subsists in the heart of the subject a hard core which remains sheltered from these ordeals. On the contrary, the sorrowful plot of this existence opposes with all its tragic weight any attempt to return to a mythical conception of a substantial subject. On the other hand, the recourse to the notion of a subject that would be nothing other than a speaker who says "I", is just as problematic. For it is not sure that the subject which is transformed by surviving the ordeals which menace its identity can speak of them and speak of them in the first person. The subject which resurfaces after being plunged into the ordeal of a non-representable says at most: "Here I am, in spite of myself ".