Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature and Film

Rudolph Binion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855757431
• eBook ISBN: 9780429923326
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film explores an intriguing facet of human behavior never yet examined in its own right - an individual or a group may contrive, unawares, to repeat a half-forgotten traumatic experience in disguise. Such reliving has shaped major careers and large-scale events throughout history. Insight into it is therefore vital for understanding historic causation past and present. Traumatic Reliving has also proliferated in literature since antiquity and lately in film as well, indicating its tacit acceptance as a piece of life by the reading and movie-going public. This book examines the evidence of history, literature, and film on how this irrational behavioral mechanism works.

CHAPTER ONE
Reliving

Reliving is live repetition. Repetition is the way of the material world—set courses of change, regular runs and re-runs, self-identical cycles and sequences, reprises unending. Life, having been born of the material world, does not escape this rule of recurrence. Before it comes full circle in death, living is mostly reliving, even short of the eternal return hypothesized by a latter-day seer, or of being trapped in a closed loop of time like tempunauts in science fiction.¹ Animals, although self-propelled, feel and act repetitively by instinct, reflex, and habit. Groups of animals likewise survive by routine, as in seasonal migrations. And humans, themselves “repetition machines”,² contribute often senseless personal patterns of behaviour to the replicative repertoire of the natural world. To be sure, not all conduct, animal or especially human, is repetitive, in confirmation whereof I tried horseradish once and never tried it again. Yet repetition, insidious repetition, is the rule with animate as with inanimate matter, however uncertain its next moment may often be.

Among the living, repetition comes in numerous variants. Before repeating its own acts, an animal will mostly repeat other animals’ acts, at least until they become its own. When animals repeat their own acts, they relive them. With humans specifically, memory intensifies physical reliving and, further, enables imaginary reliving—the recall of bygone sensations together with the feelings they aroused. Such recall may come about spontaneously within a closed-off stream of consciousness. Or it may be touched off from the outside, as when the distinctive taste of a piece of pastry dipped in herbal tea famously triggered seven fictional volumes about recovering the past.³ That taste was a pleasant one, so its original, which it brought back to mind, was as welcome a recall as the stuff of most rumination. Joys like to be remembered, even memorialized. By contrast, a chance reminder of a painful experience will sooner evoke a wince than release a flood of recollections.

A wince is a feeble, failed denial. Any sudden painful recall, however occasioned, will invite at least that much would-be denial, however fleeting. Indeed, a painful experience will itself already invite denial, however fleeting—denial that it is happening or has happened, and afterwards denial that it mattered as, however, those very denials show that it did. One way of denying that a painful experience mattered is to construe it as just one more in a familiar series of like occurrences. If, against all the odds, a painful experience is successfully denied, a chance reminder of it will elicit an eerie déjà vu. Normally, however, a painful experience cannot itself be denied; rather, the pain alone, detached from the sensory memory, will be blocked or filtered out at the source. By the pain of an overly painful experience I mean here and hereafter the mental pain: physical pain does not behave the same way. And by mental pain I mean the intense affect, whatever it may be—shame, horror, fear, anguish, distress—that made and makes the experience unbearable.

Above a certain threshold of pain, the scenario broadens and deepens in scope. With failed denial comes would-be undoing—the futile impulse to cancel an overly painful experience as if magically or to prevent it after the fact. Once that brief impulse passes, such an overly painful experience, or trauma, will as a rule be recalled incessantly, waking or sleeping, with the original affect reviving along with it. The experience may, however, be largely screened or blurred in the recall in order to mitigate the attendant pain even while remaining potentially accessible intact and in full.

A therapy developed especially since the late 1980s for overwhelming trauma aims to induce total, straight recall of the traumatic experience, affect inclusive, as if the wound could heal by being ripped wide open again. Fiction having the jump on fact, such so-called reliving therapy⁴ was already imagined once by the novelist Honoré de Balzac and again by the playwright Luigi Pirandello. In Balzac’s story, as in Pirandello’s play, the traumatic event was even replicated for therapeutic purposes, with duly disastrous results. The heroine of Balzac’s “Adieu” of 1830 goes mad when she must leave her officer lover to his fate in the bloody retreat of Napoleon’s army from Moscow; he survives to re-stage their battlefield adieu for her with her doctor’s help in a shock therapy that at once both cures and kills her.⁵ And in Pirandello’s Henry IV V of 1922, a psychiatrist re-stages around the hero the masquerade party at which a villain pricked his horse, which then threw him traumatically; instead of curing him, however, the re-staging prompts a traumatic turnabout whereby the hero runs the villain through. (He had meanwhile recovered in secret not from the trauma itself, but from its initial shock effect: the delusion that he really was the emperor Henry IV, as whom he was masquerading).⁶

Induced reliving as in Balzac, Pirandello, or some psychiatric practice is emphatically not to be confused with the spontaneous, unsuspecting reliving of a traumatic experience in fact or fancy beneath a surface disguise. Such spontaneous, unsuspecting reliving can be either chronic or episodic—either a steady symptom expressing the trauma symbolically or a discrete performance recapitulating it symbolically. The latter, the episodic reliving of a traumatic experience in all its crucial particulars, has drawn little scientific notice.⁷ Even Freud, who initially construed all neuroses as chronic traumatic relivings, afterwards constructed for them a theoretical framework recalcitrant to traumatic reliving of whichever kind, chronic or episodic: his paradoxical contribution will be discussed in Chapter 1. Meanwhile it needs heavy stressing here at the outset that not all repetitive behaviour is trauma-driven, any more than all trauma gets relived. Most repetition is merely inertial; most shocks are simply absorbed. As for bursts of joy that overwhelm like traumas, they are not, like traumas, put out of mind insofar as they can be, and for that reason alone are not in line to be relived unsuspectingly—which is just as well, for even symbolically it would be no cinch to replicate a windfall unawares.

Some prolegomena (irresistible mouthful!) to this enquiry are overdue. Human conduct is mostly actuated from within, and then mostly unconsciously: whoever sees it differently may as well quit right here. Traumatic reliving by individuals is unconscious all the way; that is, those individuals who relive a trauma are never aware of reliving it even if they do remember it in the process. Groups relive as do individuals, if perhaps somewhat more primitively on balance, with the peculiar twist that one or another member of a group may see and feel when the group as a whole is reliving. And the common mode of reliving by groups and individuals, which will be explored, has not changed since antiquity as far as I can tell.

Because it involves unconscious recall and rehash, traumatic reliving can have begun only with the human breed—unless, as in the Greek Theogony, it began with the gods and passed among them from father to son. There the earth, namely Gaia, emerged from chaos and bore the sky, alias Uranus, to cover her. Lusty Uranus impregnated mother Gaia relentlessly, breeding three races of giants including the titans and burying them all alive in her earthy folds. Womb-weary at last, Gaia induced one of her titanic sons, Cronus, to lop off the paternal member at its next eager approach. Through this gory, gooey deed the sky devolved on Cronus, who promptly set about inseminating his sister Rhea without a let-up, only to swallow each new offspring fresh upon delivery lest one supplant him in his turn. Rhea, however, tricked him into swallowing a swaddled stone in lieu of newborn Zeus, whom she hid in Crete with Gaia’s connivance. Zeus grew up to usurp the sky with the help of his wise and wily spouse, Metis: she fed his brutish father an emetic such that he regurgitated the swaddled stone followed by the whole brood of Zeus’s undigested elder siblings. Afterwards ingrate Zeus swallowed pregnant Metis in one godly gulp when Gaia warned him that a daughter by Metis could outwit him or a son dethrone him. In due course Athena sprang full-blown from his head while Metis remained intact beneath his vitals, her sharp wits enabling him to rule the sky ever after. In the final tally, Cronus had relived his traumatic dethronement of Uranus, Gaia aiding, with the child-burying converted into child-swallowing, whereupon Zeus had relived Cronus’s traumatic reliving, with the child-swallowing recast as wife-swallowing. Only later did the titan Prometheus create mankind.

A staple of old legend, ancestral trauma relived has haunted new legend as well. Thus in Franz Grillparzer’s The Ancestress of 1817, a Romantic so-called “tragedy of fate”, the traumatic precedent set by an adulteress, murdered in sin like Dante’s Francesca, haunts her posterity through periodic domestic disasters until her line expires climactically in parricide and incest. Traumas of the dead commonly haunt the living in ghost stories; a classic cinematic instance is Richard Loncraine’s Full Circle (also called The Haunting of Julia) of 1977. And as in creative fantasy, so in real life, one can relive not just a trauma of one’s own, but another’s trauma (usually an older blood relative’s) as if it were one’s own. This is puzzling, even baffling. Even more baffling is that groups as such can suffer and relive traumas about like individuals. In fact groups often acquire, and always firm up, their collective identities as a result of traumas suffered together and then relived in concert. Such reliving by groups implies group memory both conscious and unconscious—an inconceivable, but inescapable, implication. The group function looks like a vestige of our long history as hunter-gatherers operating in widely dispersed bands, the way Euripides’ regressive bacchae, although dispersed on Mount Cithaeron, would bound about “as though with a single mind”;⁸ still, vestige or no, the physiology of that “single mind” eludes detection. Hardly less puzzling, finally, is why an individual or a group should keep on painfully remembering a painful trauma, let alone relive it instead, and then with a fury—or indeed keep reliving it, as on an unmerry-go-round. “That was no fun, so here goes again!” looks like nothing so much as a misprint. I propose to try at least to illuminate, if not to solve, these human mysteries through a comparative look at several specific historic cases of traumatic reliving supplemented by fictional and cinematic examples that have enjoyed unquestioning public acceptance as true-to-life. I hope thereby to shed needful new light not just on traumatic reliving itself, but also on its two components—trauma and reliving—separately.

The vast corpus of recent trauma studies is mostly off my subject. Not only do trauma theorists tend to ignore episodic traumatic reliving, or at least miss its specificity; they lean too hard on the diagnostic category of “post-traumatic stress disorder” established by the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1980s, which standardized the definition of psychological trauma as drastic physical shock followed by persistent anxious recall or else, on the contrary, by memory blockage. Historic case studies show, however, that purely emotional as well as physical shock may entail episodic reliving, and without either stressful recall or memory blockage. On the other hand, clinical studies of posttraumatic stress can elucidate historic behaviour that reflects such stress in individuals alone or within groups as such,⁹ but that is not my subject.

Many of the fundamentals stated in this introduction will be echoed and re-echoed below for clarity’s sake. May such redundancy offend less in a book about reliving.

¹Nietzsche (1887): IV: 341; Dick (1974).

²Janet (1928): 211.

³Proust (1913–1927).

⁴More recently called “exposure therapy” or “narrative exposure therapy”, it was foreshadowed in clinical practice by Pierre Janet with an admixture of hypnotherapy.

⁵Balzac (1834–1850/1979).

⁶Pirandello (1922/1947).

⁷The phenomenon has occasionally been glimpsed without being sorted out, perhaps most closely in Van der Kolk (1987) and Van der Kolk (1989); Terr (1990): 261–280 and passim; Chu (1991): 327–332; Caruth (1996); Levy (2000): 45–53; and Orlandini (2004).

⁸Euripides (406 B.C.): 44, line 692.

⁹See, for example, Shapiro (2009) on how anxiety and denial influenced the work of the French Constituent Assembly after its traumatically felt threat of June–July 1789 from the nearly thirty thousand royal troops surrounding it.

CHAPTER TWO
Reliving with Freud

Contriving unknowingly to repeat an especially painful experience in disguise, and more than once as circumstances permit, is a pattern of human behaviour sufficiently distinct to deserve a technical name: episodic traumatic reliving. Sigmund Freud opened the way to understanding this bizarre phenomenon even though he never dealt with it clinically or even recognized it as an entity unto itself. He did see his early neurotic patients as continually reliving traumatic experiences—sometimes fresh, more often stale—but in a static form: condensed, compounded, and converted into stable symptoms. His early constructions on such symptomatic reliving, though they were in continual flux, are known collectively as his “traumatic theory of neurosis”, which was the forerunner of psychoanalysis proper. Psychoanalysis proper is commonly dated from Freud’s abandonment, by the end of 1897, of his sudden, ephemeral, ill-conceived notion that all neurosis originates in early sexual abuse and his recognition that such abus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• CHAPTER ONE Reliving
• CHAPTER TWO Reliving with Freud
• CHAPTER THREE Reliving in history
• CHAPTER FOUR Reliving in history: A closeup
• CHAPTER FIVE Reliving in letters
• CHAPTER SIX Reliving on screen
• CHAPTER SEVEN Reliving: Who, when, why?
• REFERENCES
• INDEX