The Future Life of Trauma

Partitions, Borders, Repetition

Jennifer Yusin

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823275465, 9780823275458
• eBook ISBN: 9780823275472
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a groundbreaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the Freudian metapsychology, it thinks anew the relation between temporality and traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the character of the structure of repetition.By examining the role of borders in the history of the 1947 partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in postgenocide Rwanda, The Future Life of Trauma brings to light the implications of trauma as a material event in contemporary nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, it presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity, resulting in the formation of a concept of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its power to transform itself.

CHAPTER 1

The Problem of Trauma

A young boy, approximately eighteen months old, has recently invented a most pleasurable game. Sitting on the floor, he takes a wooden spool with a string attached and throws it into his cot and out of sight. Thrilled by this act of disappearance, the boy exclaims, “o-o-o-o!” Immediately pulling the wooden spool back towards himself, the boy joyfully hails the spool’s reappearance with “da!” Over and over again, the boy gleefully throws and retrieves his wooden spool—seemingly contented by this new game. After some time has passed, the boy happens upon a full-length mirror that does not quite reach to the floor. Curious, he crouches down into the space between the mirror and the floor, realizing that when he does, his own reflection disappears from the mirror. Up and down, up and down, making his reflection disappear and return, disappear and return. A year passes. Overwhelmed by feelings of anger and abandonment when his mother leaves him to go to work, the boy defiantly throws a toy on the floor, keeping it in sight. Instead of uttering “o-o-o-o,” he now yells, “All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.”1 And the toy, animated only seconds before by the boy’s emotions, now lies motionless in plain sight.

Played by his grandson, this game, fort/da as Freud refers to it in his 1920 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, has become an iconic example of the operation of the compulsion to repeat in psychic life. The other is the recurrence of the traumatic dream and other such intrusive phenomena. In trauma theory, the compulsion to repeat has been read as evidence of the notion of the death drive, Freud’s radical postulation that calls into question the pleasure principle, and as therefore offering key insights into why the psyche is driven to repeat distressing experiences that neither pleasure nor unpleasure as categories of experience can integrate. The return to the event in traumatic nightmares and flashbacks, as Freud observes, signals the retrospective attempt to apprehend the overwhelming stimulus of the event and bind it into an experience that can be comprehended and assimilated into oneself. The fort/da game is similar in the sense that it is the activity by which the boy reiterates his mother’s departure in the effort to understand the loss associated with her absence. Yet the game is also distinct because it presents the method of working of the repetition compulsion in a “normal” activity.2

Against ubiquitous accounts of the game as staging how the repetition compulsion in trauma adheres to and is thereby a representation or manifestation of the death drive, I read the game as staging the confrontation between the process of representation, which involves the binding of repetition, and the process of representing the drive, which entails the attempt to bind repetition. Such a confrontation proceeds by way of an elaboration of time’s doubling in the context of the psychical elaboration of trauma.

As it is well known, the primary aim of Freud’s seminal 1920 work is to question the principal, governing authority of the pleasure principle in the economy of the psyche. “In the theory of psycho-analysis,” Freud remarks in the opening line, “we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle.”3 The underlying impressions of the pleasure principle “are so obvious that they can scarcely be overlooked”; its unicity and authority is not even contested when, under the influences of the ego’s instincts towards self-preservation, the reality principle insists upon and accomplishes the effects of delaying pleasure.4 The reality principle will replace the pleasure principle, but it does not desert its ultimate intentions. So the domination of the pleasure principle is not called into question by experiences that involve the transformation of pleasure into unpleasure by repression. Still there remains an inaccessible, obscure region, unaccounted for by any “philosophical or psychological theory,” that is the site for the production of “new material,” which gives rise to “fresh questions” that pose a fundamental challenge to the dominance of the pleasure principle.5 This material consists in the “mental reaction to external danger.”6

Specifically, Freud cites a perplexing condition called traumatic neurosis, which plagues World War I veterans and survivors of accidents and other such catastrophes “involving a risk to life,” as the resource for this material.7 He observes that in this condition, there is the compulsion to repeat, which fixates the patient to his trauma. Dreams repeatedly lead the patient back to the situation of the accident; what thus recurs in the patient’s dreams is the painful experience of trauma. “We are therefore left in doubt,” Freud writes, “as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle.”8

Taking a cue from Freud’s fourth chapter, in which he defines trauma as something that unexpectedly penetrates the “protective shield” (Reizschutz), trauma theory takes up the fort/da game as indicating how the compulsion to repeat in trauma exemplifies the characteristic deferred action of trauma (Nachträglichkeit).9 The psychic apparatus does not have time to prepare itself for the sudden piercing of external excitations and discovers itself so utterly overwhelmed by the flooding of excessive amounts of stimuli that there is a “disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy.”10 The violence of trauma is such that it puts the pleasure principle entirely out of action because its primary function of returning to a state of quiescence is neither prepared for nor able to diminish the external excitations as they penetrate the psyche. Instead of seeking pleasure, the psyche occupies itself with the attempt to bind those stimulations in the effort to lessen and eliminate the excitations, and assimilate the effraction. So repetition and binding (Bindung), which consists in converting “unbound” energy into “quiescent cathexis,” work together to control and tame the wild, excessive traumatic energy with the aim of returning to a state of quiescence.11

When Freud pursues the discovery of the “compulsion to repeat” (Wiederholungszwang) in the context of his analysis of the recurrence of dreams that return patients back to the scene of the accident as characteristic behavior of the condition of traumatic neurosis, he reiterates his already established conclusion that all drives are exclusively conservative in nature since they seek to return to a prior state of things.12 As Freud notes, the life drives “are conservative in the same sense as the other instincts in that they bring back earlier states of living substances.”13 Accordingly, the death drive does not take the place of the life drives (which include the pleasure principle) in its functioning or originary status.

It would seem instead, then, that the accident dream reveals the primacy of the compulsion to repeat insofar as it operates “with a view to the psychical binding.”14 Yet the dreams of those suffering from traumatic neurosis only manage to sharpen the pain of the process of repeating rather than producing pleasure or unpleasure. Even though these dreams arise “in obedience to the compulsion to repeat,” the compulsive repetition of trauma related dreams are “an exception to the proposition that dreams are fulfillments of wishes.”15 The function of the dreams therefore consist in something more originary than the fulfillment of wishes, and thus in something that is “beyond the pleasure principle.”16

United with Freud’s development of the compulsion to repeat the accident dream as coinciding with a beyond of the pleasure principle, trauma theory follows him through the next phase of his argument in chapters 5 and 6, which presents the dualism between the life drives and the death drive. The nature of the relation between processes of repetition and the dominance of the pleasure principle still troubles Freud. In an effort to resolve this problem while maintaining a logical continuity with the presentation of the compulsion to repeat, Freud tries to prove that the death drive and repetition are indissolubly linked. This is the point of separation between Freud’s work and what is called trauma theory. Trauma theory remains situated in the hypothesis that the compulsive repetition of dreams that lead patients back to the scenario of the accident follows from and is a manifestation of the death drive (Todestrieb)—that it is beyond the pleasure principle. Freud, however, departs from this critical juncture and returns to an affirmation of the supremacy of the pleasure principle, with some additional key points. Ultimately, there is no beyond of the pleasure principle for Freud.

In the seventh and final chapter, Freud notes that, given the universal character of instincts, it is not terribly surprising that certain mental processes operate independently of the pleasure principle without necessarily contradicting it. However, this does not necessarily resolve the fundamental problem of the relation between repetition and the supremacy of the pleasure principle since “an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore to an earlier state of things.”17 Compulsive repetition thereby illuminates the regressive character of all drives, which further reveals how, if the life drives and the death drive are amalgamated within each other, any dispersals of psychic phenomena necessarily proceed from the same logic. So Freud draws “a shaper distinction than we have hitherto made between function and tendency.”18 The distinction is as follows: “the pleasure principle, then, is a tendency operating in the service of a function” that occupies itself with the business of either entirely emptying the psychic apparatus of excitations or maintaining the excitations within to a constant or minimum.19 Again, there is no beyond of the pleasure principle.

However, Freud does not actually arrive at an account of the form of the death drive, though he certainly talks about an agent for it. The distinction between tendency and function begins to elaborate an inherent relation between the processes of binding and repetition that dissolves the distinction between the death drive and the pleasure principle as simple substitutes. Trauma theory relies upon there being a discrepancy in the drives that yields alternating, operative hierarchies in order to maintain the interpretation that the compulsive repetition of the accident dream is evidence of the death drive and its subsequent ways of reading trauma as producing a victim who, over and over again, is stamped out of itself into a silhouette powerlessly and ceaselessly saturated by terrifying suffusions of a past that never passes away though it has always already passed away. It is the relation between binding and repetition that is uniformly overlooked by current theoretical formulations of trauma.20 This is the source of the problem of time in trauma as both an experience of a brutal event and the conceptual apparatus that is exported into the world as a particular hermeneutics of the subject.

Although arguments concerning the repetition compulsion in trauma and its traumatizing effects consider alteration as an integral feature, the mutability of the difference between primordial temporality and lived time in repetition has not been acknowledged or investigated. We know that trauma is characterized by a happening that occurs too soon in order for it be apprehended as such and thus by the retrospective attempt to assimilate what has breached and wounded the psyche. The ruthless and vicious nature of trauma is precisely that it is an event without signification. The psychical wounds and persistent wounding to which trauma gives rise constitute, at once, a temporal rupture and a temporal irruption. The deferred action that characterizes trauma puts into action a new attempt to bind the traumatic stimulus. Binding in general, and particularly the attempt to bind as it is put into motion by the forced intrusion of trauma, proceeds from an irrevocable temporal difference between a more primitive state of things, which, for Freud, is neuronal or biological life, and is thus its own form of repetition. It also relies upon a preceding relation to time in which the binding of traumatic excitations may convert the “unbound” energy into “bound” energy, thereby returning to a state of quiescence. The deferred action of trauma does not stop there and merely repose in the repetitive act of sending the victim back to the scene of trauma. Given its necessary relation to binding and binding’s necessary relation to the future, there can be no teleological aim to the compulsive aspect of traumatic repetitions. By its very nature, the character of compulsion is not necessarily determinist. Since we do in fact witness behaviors that reproduce and reiterate scenes of trauma that are themselves traumatizing, there must be another functioning of the deferred action that reveals another crucial process.

Generally speaking repetition in psychic life works to establish a new form of quiescence. It is an activity that functions to maintain the excitations within to a constant. This should not be read as an affirmation of familiar arguments about how one enters into a state of perpetual traumatization since it fails to account for the relation between binding and repetition. It also elides Freud’s own assertion about the two defining characteristics of traumatic neurosis: “first, that the chief weight in their causation seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright; and secondly, that a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule against the development of a neurosis.”21 Repetition, as Freud’s second characteristic suggests, is a type of reparative or restorative agent insofar as the psychic wound arises in the place of neurosis. The insistent return, the compulsion, is the mechanism, as Lacan suggests in “Tuché and Automaton,” by which repetition works, on its own and by its own necessity, as the system of lived events (Erlebnisse) that Freud identifies, and which can be and are integrated into the psyche.22 Repetition itself becomes a form of homeostasis in the sense that it brings about a new state of constancy that subverts the emergence of neurosis. The function of the compulsion to repeat in trauma is uncertain and unstable. On the one hand, it is the binding that forms the regime of regulating pain. On the other hand, it is the purely automatic recurrence. In both, repetition moves towards “an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads.”23 An external force is that which momentarily diverts this immanent movement towards this end point life seeks. The further life goes away from the prior state, the more complex these “circuitous paths” become. Life appears, it would seem, in a process of developmental complexity.

SHATTERING THE CRYSTAL, THE SHATTERED CRYSTAL, AND CRYSTALLIZING THE SHATTER: THE EVENT

The indissoluble necessity of the “protective shield,” Freud’s theory of “psychic reality,” which is where events are translat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: The Place of a Thousand Hills
• Introduction: The Interface of Trauma
• 1. The Problem of Trauma
• 2. The Eventality of Trauma
• 3. Whither Partition?
• 4. Rwanda Transforming
• After Word
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index