Bearing Witness to the Witness

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Four Modes of Traumatic Testimony

Dana Amir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351379472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma has lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: the "metaphoric mode", the "metonymic mode, " the "excessive mode" and the " Muselmann mode." In doing so, the author demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma moreadequately in a clinical psychoanalytic setting.

To follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (located between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and "raw" testimonies taken from Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterizes each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analyzed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation.

Bearing Witness to the Witness will appeal to trauma researchers of all research areas, including psychologists, psychoanalysts, literary scholars as well as philosophers of language and philosophers of the mind. The book will also be of interest and relevance to clinical psychologists, psychoanalytic candidates and graduate students in literary theory and criticism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• epi
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 When language meets the traumatic lacuna: Four modes of traumatic testimony
• 2 Autobiographical fiction or fictional autobiography?: Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood
• 3 The post-traumatic dyad: Agota Kristó f’s The Notebook
• 4 The center mode as opposed to the marginal mode: Yehiel Dinur (Ka-Tzetnik)’s House of Dolls
• 5 The traumatic lacuna as the negative possession of the other: Aharon Appelfeld’s “Bertha”
• 6 Transcending the traumatic real: Six variations in six stories by Ida Fink
• 7 From the collapse of signifiers to the reconstruction of language: Robert Antelme’s The Human Race
• 8 The lacuna: Reading children’s testimonies
• 9 Modes of memory, modes of healing
• 10 Awakening the narrator: Clinical work with modes of testimony
• Epilogue: Hiroshima Mon Amour and the command of boundary violation
• Index