Collective Trauma and the Psychology of Secrets in Transnational Film

Deborah Lynn Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351246040
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Collective Trauma and the Psychology of Secrets in Transnational Film advances a methodological line of inquiry based on a fresh insight into the ways in which cinematic meaning is generated and can be ascertained. Premised on a critical reading strategy informed by a metapsychology of secrets, the book features analyses of internationally acclaimed films—Guillermo del Torro's Pan's Labyrinth, Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return, Jee-woon Kim's A Tale of Two Sisters, and Alejandro Amenábar's The Others. It demonstrates how a rethinking of the figure of the secret in national film yields a new vantage point for examining heretofore unrecognized connections between collective historical experience, cinematic production and a transnational aesthetic of concealment and hiding.

1 New Psychoanalytical Tools for Social Science Inquiry¹

As beloved an art form as it is, film has more to tell us than it is commonly given credit for. But this is changing. The upsurge of film and visual culture studies in the social sciences over the last two decades is just one example. This book is another. In it, I use film to explore collective experience, specifically traumatic experience and collective memory. The analytic technique I demonstrate here is the culmination of ten years of developing a course in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

My course, Putting the World on the Couch: Psychoanalysis and International Studies, started out as a survey of how social science scholarship and psychoanalysis engage each other and of the new areas of research that have emerged out of that cross-fertilization.² Film was my point of entrée into collective memory formation processes.

Film serves a teaching function in the world at large, not only among scholars;³ see, for example, Sam Wineburg, Susan Mosborg, Dan Porat, and Ariel Duncan’s investigation of how people learned about the Vietnam War.⁴ It has become an important object of social science research precisely because of this expanded role as an “influential source of historical information and perspective across family generations.”⁵ In fact, some scholars have argued that since the end of World War II, cinema has been our dominant source of historical memory; in this view, it functions as a “prosthetic” memory for collective experience.⁶

My students quickly came to appreciate the opportunity that cultural artifacts offer for exploring collective aspects of trauma and memory formation that are often too diffuse or unwieldy to be studied in the world at large. But the more we explored, the more I felt the need for a clear exploratory strategy. What perspectives, what knowledge, would best enable my students to cull from these rich resources insights about collective memory formation? How should I even talk about ways to do this? Ultimately, the course developed into an effort to teach this expanded vision of cineliteracy, and that is the organizing principle of this book.

The Puzzle of Collective Memory

Before we can take full advantage of film’s capacity to refract and comment on collective memories of traumatic experience, we need to have a clear grasp of what collective memory is. This is a challenge. There is no consensus among scholars on such central perplexities as how collective memory is formed or transmitted, to say nothing of “the unfathomability of traumatic experience” and how that is represented and interpreted.⁷

Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is considered the founder of collective memory studies. He argues that groups have collective memories, which are manifested through social frameworks such as families, religious organizations, and schools.⁸ Because these institutions are the channels through which experience can be recollected and expressed, Halbwachs reasons, an individual’s understanding of herself and her past is strongly linked to the institutional, or group, consciousness. This view also allows Halbwachs to account for the way the meanings of memory can change over time. He contends that the memories a person maintains may vary from context to context—that is, say, of family, class, or religion—and that these variants may be held simultaneously.⁹

Halbwachs’s work has catalyzed an avalanche of research, but he does not give much attention to the physical and mental realities of memory or to the relationship between individual and collective memory. Individual memory involves neurological and cognitive processes that have no known equivalents in groups and appears therefore to be constitutionally distinct from collective processes. Another indication of the complexity of these issues is the fact that there is more than one kind of individual memory: “procedural” memory stores bodily skills and habitual movements, “semantic” memory stores the fund of knowledge that is acquired mentally through conscious learning, and “episodic” memory processes autobiographical experience.¹⁰ Halbwachs does not address these distinctions.

At the same time, however, Halbwachs’s recognition of the linguistic basis of collective memory establishes a kinship between it and its individual counterpart. Language is certainly a collective phenomenon, and the new assumption is that it is central to both individual and collective memory processes.¹¹ Workers in the field have compared the language used in individual and collective accounts of traumatic developments and identified congruencies in the ways memories take narrative form; the congruencies reflect a system through which “institutions vested with authority, including ‘stories, myths and images’ but extending to the church and the law, articulate memory.”¹²

This is a helpful concept for investigating how a film represents collective memory. It allows us to link concrete elements of a filmic representation to the language of cultural memory. Sensitivity to how memories of violence may be expressed through tropes of vengeance in film,¹³ or how concepts of justice or compassion are signaled through rhetorical devices and images,¹⁴ for example, gives form to the amorphous concept of memory analysis. Nonetheless, while these approaches have refined our ability to identify the “what” of what is shared among individual and collective memories, they leave open the question of “why.”

To answer, we must explain why past experiences and the affects associated with them are preserved; we must also account for the processes by which these experiences are articulated—the processes that lead, or do not lead, to their discursive production and transmission.¹⁵ Such accounts, however, often end up derailed, mired once more in the relationship between individual memories of trauma and collective experience of the same event. Questions about how to balance out “memories of individual suffering in theory and ‘on the ground’,” and collective memory processes that “exceed those of relations between individuals,”¹⁶ still dominate the discussion.¹⁷

New Tools for Collective Memory Research

I teach in my classes, and will demonstrate here, some analytic tools that break down the binary division in collective memory research. They exemplify a psycholinguistic approach that permits the “analysis of specificity and particularity of discourses and practices” while also ensuring that these specifics and particulars are not divorced from the collective structures and institutions from which they are drawn. They are built on the work of Hungarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham, and of Abraham in conjunction with his colleague Maria Torok,¹⁸ who theorizes about how the linguistic surround informs awareness in individuals.

Abraham and Torok’s model of the mind focuses distinctively on breakdowns of signification, that is, on apparent losses of intelligibility in language. They thought that the psyche is naturally inclined to growth and expansion, which it accomplishes by feeding on, digesting, and naming the life experiences that people confront in development. Abraham believed that the impersonal and programmatic quality of the classical Freudian formulation involving predetermined and universal “drives” or “instincts” denies the uniqueness of individual lives.¹⁹

The processing of experience into language, in Abraham’s view, is what ultimately gives us the power to think about it. But young children’s mastery of language depends for a crucial developmental period on the linguistic surround provided by their parents, and the parents’ own past experiences, conscious or not, will have imparted an affective charge to their speech and so to the words that they offer their children. Thus, Abraham and Torok argue, mental organization is not only a dynamic response to a subject’s predictable lived experience but also a conceptual structure that is passed down in families. The authors postulate that when the words necessary to name a child’s experience are overly laden with affect or content that is unavailable or unwelcome to the parent’s awareness, the words that the child needs may be (consciously or unconsciously) withheld or transmitted to the child with an affective burden that is beyond the child’s capacity to process. The child may or may not consciously perceive the parent’s discomfort, but in either case, the necessary linguistic tools are not made available. The processing and naming of the child’s experience fail, and a void is left in their stead. In this way, the unconscious linguistic distortions and repressions embodied in the parent’s speech are reconstructed in the child’s.

Abraham believed that traumatic experience interrupts or overwhelms a person’s capacity to process it into language, leaving behind fragments of personal history of which the person can neither think nor speak. Inaccessible to awareness, these fragments remain present in the person’s psyche and language only as an absence. Yet they do remain present, and in their absence may be felt, seen, and passed on to linguistic heirs. More about that in a moment.

This view disallows the idea that the so-called “real” world is a transparent, intentional, and objective correlate of subjective lived experience—an idea that, according to Abraham, discounts the role of the unconscious in shaping and informing conscious experience. He maintains that “reality” is experience that demands to be accommodated; it is experience that agitates the psyche toward the process of psychic expansion that Nicholas Rand calls self-fashioning.²⁰ Self-fashioning is a system of assimilation and adaptation that continues throughout life, which Abraham understood to be the organizing or sensemaking principle of the psyche. But the readiness of a child’s psyche to digest and assimilate new experience is determined by the degree to which a parent’s unconscious (in the form of words) enables or inhibits it. Self-fashioning, therefore, even while it grapples with “the stuff of our own lives,”²¹ is influenced by parental sagas transmitted by the fact of absence and is the product of an infinitely regressed family history.

This idea, that the linguistic surround colors how people process and name experience, is of course not novel to Abraham and Torok; indeed, it was a premise of Halbwachs’s understanding of collective memory. Kali Tal demonstrates it from a different perspective, showing how the linguistic surround created by the sharing and retelling of individual trauma narratives penetrates “the vocabulary of the larger c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Romanization Systems Used for Russian and Korean Film Analyses
• 1 New Psychoanalytical Tools for Social Science Inquiry
• 2 Haunted Inheritance: Fantasy as Phantom in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth
• 3 Uncanny Reunions, Filial Obligations, and the Trope of Haunting in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return
• 4 Imperial Legacy, Aborted Mourning, and the Meaning of Horror in Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters
• 5 The Religious Specter: Identifying the Intruder in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others
• 6 Epilogue
• Index