Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community

History and Contemporary Reappraisals

Judith L. Alpert, Elizabeth R. Goren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317401681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Trauma is one of the hottest contemporary topics within psychoanalysis, whilst many psychoanalysts are increasingly interested in applying their skills outside the traditional setting of the consulting room, especially in response to disasters, wars and serious social issues. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community seeks to correct the misconceptions of what analysts do and how they do it and debunk the stereotype of psychoanalysts stuck in their offices plying their wares on the worried well.

Bringing together a group of eminent contributors, this volume considers how psychoanalysis may best be expanded to help in social and community settings, to understand these wider issues from a psychoanalytic perspective, and provide clear clinical guidance and clinical examples of how best to work in a wide variety of non-traditional ways. The innovative work featured includes taking testimony, in-situ interviewing, documentary film-making, social activism, ethnic and political conflict mediation, on-site workshops as well as direct clinical interventions. The reader is taken from the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the Vietnam War to the Balkan Wars and Palestinian-Israeli conflict, from the political violence of the disappeared in Argentina to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and from chronic conditions of poverty in India to racism in the post-Jim Crow South.

Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and anyone studying on the increasing number of trauma courses being given today in universities. Lay readers with an interest in the traumatic fallout as a result of chronic conditions or the myriad disasters that occur globally will find this book illuminating. For the non-specialist mental health professional, including non-analytic psychotherapists, social workers and others who work in the community, this book offers concrete advice on dealing with intervention issues such as entry and integration, as well as on management of multiple and complex trauma in a non-clinical setting.

Part I

Receiving testimony

Chapter 1
Reestablishing the internal “Thou” in testimony of trauma¹

Dori Laub

Introduction

The following chapter highlights the therapeutic aspects of the testimonial intervention—an intervention that is also used in oral history and in the judicial context. Specifically, we are dealing here with the video testimonies of severely traumatized Holocaust survivors.

In two out of the three interview excerpts cited in this chapter, I served as the interviewer–listener. I was trying to promote a dialogic process between the survivor and myself and between the survivor and herself, in which her most severe traumatic experiences, perhaps for the first time in her life, were put into words. This chapter will repeatedly return to the special attributes of the dialogic process of trauma testimony.

The nature of traumatic experience

Philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists and writers have tried to convey the essence of massive psychic trauma. According to psychoanalyst Boulanger (2005), trauma “collapses” the distinction between the external world and internal experience: “when the external world becomes a direct reflection of our most terrifying thoughts, feelings, fantasies and nightmares, reality testing is irrelevant” (pp. 21–31). Cognitive functions, such as the reflective registration of external events and the observation of one’s own responses to them, cease to operate under conditions of severe trauma. Tarantelli (2003) likens catastrophic psychic trauma to an explosion:

In so far as an explosion disintegrates whatever is in its epicenter, it cannot be perceived or experienced or thought for there is nothing left to do so. Another way of saying this is that there is an utter absence, a radical break in being, an instant in which nothing exists (p. 915).

Jean Amery (1980), himself a survivor of the Gestapo torture chambers and of Auschwitz, writes:

[B]ut only in torture does the transformation of the person into flesh become complete … The tortured person is only a body and nothing else besides that … The pain was what it was, beyond that there is nothing to say … [It marks] the limit of language to communicate (p. 33).

All three writers indicate that it is the absence of mental experience that characterizes massive psychic trauma because the mind is unable to register, cognitively and emotionally, the traumatic events. The self, as the interpreter of the experience and the creator of meaning, thus ceases to function.

On the nature of traumatic memories

According to Golden (2009), “The traumatic wound … excludes linguistic representation” (p. 82). “[It] outstrips discursive and representational resources” (Golden, 2009, p. 5). Yet traumatized people report so-called traumatic memories. These memories are indelible, sensory, affective, imprinted fragments that lack narrative cohesion and agency. These imprints of visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic and physical sensations and strong affect remain outside a narrative structure, outside a story, even outside experience as it is remembered.

They are not subject to assimilation or to evolutionary change through integration into the associative network. They remain discrete, retaining their magnetic power in their contradictory, detailed and persistent clarity and also in the concomitant dense, yet absorbing, opaqueness that enshrouds them. They are qualitatively different from ordinary memories because they can continue to exert an influence on unconscious cognitive and emotional processes many years after the original traumatic event.

Memories of extreme traumatization: theoretical considerations

I would like now to propose a phenomenological formulation of traumatic memory emanating from what is called in psychoanalysis “object relations theory.” Holocaust trauma—and genocide trauma for that matter—refuses knowledge because at its very core lies the complete failure of the empathic human dyad. The executioner does not heed the victim’s plea for life; instead, he relentlessly proceeds with the execution. Human responsiveness came to be nonexistent in the death camps. A “Thou” responsive to one’s basic needs no longer existed. Faith in the possibility of communication died; intrapsychically there was no longer a matrix of two people, a self and a resonating other. This despair of being able to communicate with others diminished the victims’ ability to be in contact and in tune with themselves and to be able to register their own experience or reflect upon it.

Given that survivors of extreme traumatization experience a profound state of inner lonesomeness, it is necessary to explore the link between this traumatic state of loneliness—of objectlessness—and the absence of communicable thought. For traumatic sensation to be experienced as thought, it must undergo the process of symbolization. According to Melanie Klein (1930), it is “not only [that] symbolism [comes] to be the foundation of all fantasy and sublimation, but more than that, it is the basis of the subject’s relation to the outside world and to reality, in general” (p. 221). Therefore, to perceive, recognize or participate in reality, the process of symbolization needs to be in place. “Symbol formation,” according to Hannah Segal (1991), “governs the capacity to communicate, since all communication is made by means of symbols” (p. 395). She proceeds, “Symbols are needed in not only communication with the external world, but also in internal communication,” that is, with oneself (Segal, 1991, p. 395). “The capacity to communicate with oneself by using symbols is, I think, the basis of verbal thinking, which is the capacity to communicate with oneself by means of words” (Segal, 1991, p. 396). When the empathic other totally fails in the external world of the death camps, the internal, empathic “Thou,” the means for self-dialogue, ceases to exist. The ongoing internal dialogue, the internal “I” speaking to the internal “Thou,” which allows for historicity, narrative and meaning to unfold, falls silent. Sensory impressions, no matter how powerful, remain fragments that do not coalesce. Thus, the two-part sequence consisting first, of the destruction of the internal “other” object and, second, of the failure of the process of symbolization through internal dialogue, leads to the absence of conscious experience and also to the absence of repressed memory. It is as though memory in its wider form becomes nonexistent, a state which very much fits with Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth’s description (1996) of traumatic memories as the return of “emotional and sensory states with little capacity for verbal representation” (p. 296).

The above-described processes that promote the shutdown of the mental registering processes, the cessation of the dialogue with the internal “Thou” (and, ultimately, of symbolization and thought), lead to a certain absence, or rather erasure, of memory. Primo Levi (cited in Tarantelli, 2003) poignantly described this phenomenon in his account of the Musselmänner state that he witnessed in the death camps. The “absence of any ‘trace of thought’” (Levi, 1987, p. 96) “… [pointed to] a destruction of all mental activity that had a full individuality, subjectivity, or personal being” (Tarantelli, 2003, p. 917). Hence, the narration of this state from within becomes impossible.

Testimony as a relibidinization of the fragments

Testimony is a powerful, libido-driven process of putting fragments together, creating a whole, making such a whole a part of one’s experiential landscape in a temporal, historical sequence, historicizing it, restoring the narrative flow and associatively linking it to other experiences and to the experiencing “I.” Testimony is a process of symbolizing the concrete so that the traumatic experience can become communicable to oneself and known and transmittable to an “other,” thus producing an experience that can be known, remembered, transmitted and forgotten.

According to psychoanalytic theory, an object is passionately yearned for and desperately needed to make this libidinally charged testimonial process possible. This object is the addressee, an intimate companion for the journey into yet-uncharted territory—a totally present, listening “Thou.” Such a listening “Thou” is the sine qua non, the indispensable condition for the dialogic process between the internal “I” and the internal “Thou” to resume.

Let us turn now to the video testimony itself. To begin, the witness identifies herself by stating her name and the date and place of her birth. She is then invited to delve into early family and childhood memories. Personal experience and images are emphasized. The interviewer asks her to imagine sitting at a living-room table and opening an album of old faded photos; he asks her to describe what she sees. She is invited to view her own self-made movie that starts rolling in her mind and to relate what she sees. What she relates is immediate, personal and visual. The interviewer allows his own imagination to flow as he takes in the visual, the auditory and the kinesthetic, all that is transmitted in the testimony. The fine nuances in the tone of voice, body movement and posture and facial expression—all of these are very important for the interviewer to take in. The interviewer’s own flow of associations complements the multimodal transmittals in the testimony and informs his interventions.

Finding the “Thou” in the testimonial relationship

Witnesses and listeners have a common goal—jointly to visit a lived experience of extremity, to step into the place in which neither of them had been before. Literally speaking, the witness has been there, but experientially she had been absent from it. Caruth’s concept (1996) of the “unclaimed experience” is very helpful here. At the moment the trauma occurred, the person who was affected was not there to experience it. She is quite aware of her absence, of having missed it, and feels compelled to return to it and at the same time terrified to come near it. As pointed out earlier, it is a place of utter aloneness. Therefore, the promise of a companion–listener who will join her makes such a venture thinkable, perhaps even inviting; the hope is that she will experience a henceforth foreclosed moment of intense intimacy.

The companion–listener echoes such feelings of anticipation, being aware at the same time of the responsibility she is taking on—not to flinch at whatever she hears or experiences, and to let nothing detract from her total presence in, and to, the moment. Her goal is to facilitate what the witness anticipates, which is an encounter with herself, a homecoming to a most profound personal truth, a foray into a territory she had either fearfully and carefully avoided or allowed herself to experience only on a separate, parallel track, as though it belonged to someone else.

In order to integrate the traumatic fragments and turn them into real knowledge, the survivor needs to locate the fervently yearned-for dialogic “Thou” within herself. She can do so by finding a trustworthy, passionate and totally present companion–listener in whom she can temporarily anchor that internal “Thou.” That listener has not only to be totally present, but also ahead of the survivor in the place of trauma, patiently waiting for her there. She has to assist her actively by providing a holding frame of time, space and sequence, and she must actively intervene when the survivor is overwhelmed by her feelings, at a loss for words and faltering because she cannot sustain the effort or wants to flee the terror, grief and pain.

It is this form of passionately involved, active listening that the interviewer offers to the survivor through the process of the video testimony. The listening sets in motion the “coming together” of the disjointed traumatic fragments into a hitherto unknown, cohesive narrative, which often surprises the survivor herself. By hearing herself she realizes that, at the outset, she had not known all that she knew. Undoubtedly, other audiences besides the current companion–listener—past, present and future audiences—are implicitly, although most likely unconsciously, addressed in the video testimony, whereby it becomes a historical event in itself. It is through the restoration of her internal “Thou” that the survivor is able to tell the story of her experience—both to herself and to society at large.

Testimony and psychoanalysis

Testimony is a meeting place for the witnessing and repair of trauma-induced fragmented memories and psychic disruption. The testimonial intervention responds to, and addresses, that which has been deeply wounded and not found an opportunity to heal in the trauma survivor. A psychoanalytic understanding of the interviewer and interviewee relationship during the testimonial intervention not only vastly contributes to our understanding of the traumatic damage but also informs us about the healing processes that need to be set in motion to repair it.

The uniqueness of the testimonial intervention lies in the fact that there is always an event, an experience—although it may cover a lifetime—that is known to be there, even if it has hitherto not been consciously formulated. Thus it is information that has yet to be recorded and brought to an addressee—to a party interested in receiving it. Testimony is therefore an urgent transmittal of information. There is an unrelenting internal pressure to convey it, as well as an external readiness and eagerness to receive it.

When such transmittal has been accomplished, the survivor no longer is, or feels, alone with the inexpressible extreme experience. She is less helplessly prey to its devastating impact. The internal cauldron of sensations and affects has been put into the frame of a sequential narrative; it can now be remembered, transmitted and forgotten. However, such narrative is never complete, and highly charged blank spots of the inexpressible (almost unimaginable) experience persist, exerting their magnetic power on the survivor, who feels compelled endlessly to revisit them while at the same time constantly fleeing their proximity.

These intense, affect-laden voids of memory—which, to begin with, can obliterate the traumatic experience in its entirety—constitute the power source that drives testimony and exerts the pressure for its deliverance. This mechanism holds true for a broad range of experiences of extreme trauma. In personal observations, I have found that cancer survivors, when feeling safe in the company of other survivors, are similarly driven to “tell their story” of their encounters with death. A group of chronically hospitalized “psychotic” Holocaust survivors, interviewed in Israel in recent years, experienced the same internal pressure to bear witness (Laub, 2005; Strous et al., 2005; Kaplan and Laub, 2009). Unfortunately, their capacity to symbolize, free associate, reflect and verbalize has been so profoundly damaged by the chronicity of their condition (lasting for decades), their social isolation and their somatic treatments (insulin shock, ECT and psychotropic medication), that all they were able to create was a constricted, static and fragmented narrative.

The goal of traditional psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is to allow for the emergence of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Expanding our analytic identity: The inclusion of a larger social perspective
• PART I Receiving testimony
• PART II Therapeutic encounters outside the frame
• PART III Facilitating collective mourning
• PART IV Psychoanalytic scholarship and activism
• Conclusion: Psychoanalysis, trauma, and community: Lessons learned
• Index