“Autobiography, Traum a Theory and Lacan ” N I C O L A S P I E R R E B O I L E A U L E R M A , E A 8 5 3 , A M U U N I V E R S I T É A I X - M A R S E I L L E Une conférence de la journée d’études « La réception de Lacan à l’Université » Centre TIL : Texte, Image, Langage , et Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et Transculturelles (C.R.I.T.) Réalisation technique d’AIDE-numérique – PSIUN – UB – (FS)
Introduction 1. “the cultural awareness that something significant was happening around and through memoir crystallized in relation to the recognition of trauma’s centrality to it.” (Gilmore, 2)
Tra um a Theory w ithout Psy choa na ly sis 2. “Freud has gone out of fashion, and now some historians of psychoanalysis scurry like old-time undertakers to the scene of the most recent exposure, hoping to drum up some trade for the burial business.” (Antze & Lambek, 76) 3. “more on the person’s subjective perceptions of fear, threat, and risk to well-being” (Brown)
4. ‘In classic medical usage ‘trauma’ refers not to the injury inflicted but to the blow that inflicted it, not to the state of m ind that ensues but to the event that provoked it. [… ] The location of the term has been shifting from [the blow to the injury].’ (Erikson, 184) 5. “overwhelming experience of sudden and catastrophic event sin which responsibility to the events occurs in often uncontrolled, repetitive hallucinations” (Caruth, 59-60)
6. “Once again, Woolf’s self-analysis is consistent with what trauma survivors and experts tell us when they try to name the ‘essence’ of what abusers aim to destroy.” (Cramer) 7. “increasingly memory worth talking about – worth remembering, is memory of trauma” (Antze & Lambek, xii)
Tra um a Aga inst Psy choa na ly sis 8. “Might the therapeutic power of psychoanalysis reside more in the experience of “rememory” or re-enactment than in the scene of transference posited by Freud?” (Henke) 9. “ the defining mark of personal identity” and Ian Hacking’s argument that “the forgotten is the formative”, Ruth Leys “suggest[s] that, at the limit, it is precisely what cannot be remembered that is decisive for the subject – and for psychoanalysis.”
10. Numerous neurophysiologists think that “their” unconscious is hardly different from the one of psychoanalysts: it is, according to them, frozen memories stowed away safely somewhere in the brain. … The unconscious is thus considered as this exhaustive registering of the past. The unconscious however is not specifically defined as memories that are forgotten and that only need to be stimulated so they re-appear… A memory (and with it the stock of related symbols) remains unconscious not because it has been forgotten, but because the subject cannot grasp its effect/ affect. The absence of the subject is what makes it unconscious, when the event is often remembered very well and every day to boot (as can be seen in some traumatic scenes). (Pommier, 219-220, my translation)
11. The aesthetic theory that dominates this field has emerged from the work of Lyotard, Derrida and Cathy Caruth’s revision of Paul de Man and reads trauma as an aporia of representation, placing emphasis on difficulty, rupture and impossibility, consistently privileging aesthetic experimentation. Meanwhile, our culture is saturated with stories that see trauma not as a blockage but a positive spur to narrative. (Luckhurst, 82-83)
Traum a With Psychoanalysis 12. “The place of the real, which goes from trauma to fantasy – in as much as fantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something that is quite primary and determinant in the function of repetition – here is what needs to be understood now.” (Lacan, 70) 13. “the repetition which ‘emerges as the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” and “the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound.” (Caruth, 31)
14. “It is not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is unassim ilable in it – in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin?” (Caruth, 101)
15. I would suggest that it is this crisis of truth, the historical enigma betrayed by trauma, that poses the greatest challenge to psychoanalysis, and is being felt more broadly at the centre of trauma research today. For the attempt to understand trauma brings one repeatedly to this peculiar paradox: that in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, that immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness.” (Caruth, ed., 6)
16. “Really, if you want to write you have to be desperate… The thing which prompts you to sit down and write must be something which haunts you.” (Henke, Shattered Subjects ) 17. “Oblivious of the full psychological impact of trauma, she is plagued by symptoms of hyperarousal whenever she hears lyrical echoes of her sister’s name” claims Henke with no rhetorical frills (Henke, 84) 18. “Terrified of the specular gaze of a hostile world, Janet succumbs to post-traumatic dysphoria: ‘Loss, death, I was philosophical about everything: I still had my writing, … and if necessary I could use my schizophrenia to survive’. (A 212)”(Henke, 88)
Conclusion 19. “I have discussed these issues at length because I want to argue that Janet Frame’s psychiatric case history gives evidence of abnormal bereavement and post-traumatic stress disorder, but no evidence whatsoever of schizophrenia.” (92)
Works Cited Antze P. & M. J. Lambek. 1996. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Traum a and Mem ory , New York: Routledge. Astier, Michèle, “Note sur le traumatisme”, http:/ / www.causefreudienne.net/ note-sur-le-traumatisme/ Bell, Quentin. 1973 & 1974. Virginia Woolf , biographie I et II, Virginia Stephen 1882-1912 et Mrs Woolf 1912-1941 , traduit de l’anglais par Francis Ledoux, Paris, Stock (1972). Caruth, Cathy (ed.). 1995. Traum a, Explorations in Mem ory , Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. -, 1996. Unclaim ed Experience , Traum a, Narrative and History , Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Egan, S. 1999. Mirror Talk : Genres of Crisis in Contem porary Autobiography , Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. Freud, Sigmund. « Beyond the Pleasure Principle », Freud, Sigmund. « Introduction à la psychanalyse », ch. 23 and others, 1916. Freud, Sigmund. La naissance de la psychanalyse, PUF, p. 36.1 Freud S., « Esquisse d’une psychologie scientifique », p. 363 et suivantes. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Lim its of Autobiography , Cornell University Press. Gordon, C., Pryor, R. & Watkins, G. 1990. Sounds from the Bell Jar , Ten psychotic Authors , London: Macmillan. Henke, Suzette. 2000. Shattered Subjects , Traum a and Testim ony in Wom en’s Life-Writing, New York, St Martin’s Press. Henke, Suzette and Eberly, David (ed.). 2007. Virginia Woolf and Traum a , Em bodied Texts , New York: Pace University Press. Lacan, Jacques. Le Sém inaire, Livre XI, Les Quatre Concepts fondam entaux de la psychanalyse (1963-64), texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Lee, Hermione. 1999. Virginia Woolf , New York, Random House, Vintage (1996). Maleval, J.-C. 2012. Étonnantes m ystifications, De la psychothérapie autoritaire, Paris, Éditions Navarin, « Le champ freudien ». Pommier, Gérard. Com m ent les neurosciences dém ontrent la psychanalyse , Champs, « Essais », 2004. Poole, R. 1990. The Unknow n Virginia Woolf , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (1978). Rubin Suleiman, S. 2008. “Judith Herman and Contemporary Trauma Theory”, WSQ , vol.36, n°1&2, 176-281.
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