Translations of âTraumaâ
And then I was going to write on the accident, and specifically on the incommensurability of the cause and effect in the accident. While I was teaching Moses and Monotheism, in which the accident is so central, the first thing I noticed was that right away you could see itâs about a death that is missed. But at the same time all of the prefaces named very specific proper names of where Freud was living or going to live. So there was this strange situation: on the one hand there was a theory of the missed event but on the other hand there was the specificity of a name and the historicity of the framework in which he was writing.
So I got interested in trauma through the accident example. And then the psychoanalyst Dori Laub showed me a videotape of a conference that discussed the LâAmbiance Plaza disaster in Connecticut that had happened recently. And the video had had a bunch of clinicians who had worked with these people. And there was a therapist named Robert Ostroff who was working with a guy who had seen his best friend die. And this man said over and over again, âI can still see his eye hanging out of his socket. Could he see me? Could he see me?â And then the therapist said his dreams were accurate or preciseâthat the dreams or the hallucinations of traumatized people are precise until they get better, when they became symbolic. So all of a sudden, the notion of traumaâthis idea of the force of the trauma being bound up with the nightmare or hallucination, rather than with ordinary consciousnessâlinked up with what I had learned about referentiality from [the literary critic and theorist] Paul de Man. He doesnât call it referentiality exactly. But I understood some of his writing and teaching as attempting to articulate how the force of a text, what we might think of as its reality element, may arise where our understanding of the text is ruptured or interrupted, and not on the level of semantic comprehension, where we might expect it. And I realized that the phenomenon of trauma sounds a lot like this element of reading, this relation to what I thought of in terms of referentialityâspecifically, the rupturing force of it. ⊠And so that was amazing.
And then Dori encouraged me to go to the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies annual conference. Just about everything that I heard from the people at this conference seemed to contain the same paradoxâthe seeming accuracy of the returning image or behavior combined with its unconsciousness or splitting-off. And the clinicians and researchers were discovering it, too. It was still so new. Everyone was saying: Wow, the dreams are accurate, but they canât remember. Or they would speak in terms of dissociative effects. For example, when the most overwhelming events ought to create increased levels of stress hormones but in fact produce the opposite. Every single talk had that paradox in it, at least as I heard it.
About this time, I had been asked to do an issue of American Imago on psychoanalysis and ethics and I ended up changing the topic to trauma.1 And then I just got interested in it and thought I should write on it.
So thatâs how my interest developed. I wasnât really thinking about trauma originally, but then it just kind of unfolded from my previous interest in the nonexperiential encounters that are central to but not assimilable within experience. So the work on trauma is kind of related to the first book as well as to the original idea for a second book, but it wasnât a plan.
I often say âthe experience and notion of trauma,â in order to mark the difficulty with simply understanding the writing on trauma as providing a clear concept with a clear object, or as being distant and separable from its presumed referent. I noticed that Derrida does something similar with the term âarchiveâ in Archive Fever. Heâll say âThe concept and figure of the archive.â When I was writing (in Literature and the Ashes of History) about Derridaâs text as a reading of Freud and as a repetition of Freudâs own repeating of his earlier work in his later work, I argued that the relation between the term âtraumaâ and its presumed referent is itself a kind of repetition, and that this is the structure of its signification. So, for example in Moses and Monotheism, the presumed object, or the referent of the concept of, or the term, âtraumaâ is an experience that is delayed. This presumed object is an experienceâthat is, a kind of non-experienceâof delay. But the relation between the experience and the concept of the experience is itself described by Freud in terms of a delay. Thus, Freud first gives the example of how it may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision, and then weeks later this person has symptoms. After stating this, Freud says that â[a]s an afterthought we observe thatâin spite of the fundamental differences ⊠there is a correspondence in one point. It is the feature which one might term latencyâ (Freud, Moses 84). Here, the word Freud uses (translated as âas an afterthoughtâ) is nachtrĂ€glich â this is the word for the delay, as in the term NachtrĂ€glichkeit.2 So in the movement from the experience of trauma to the theory of the traumatic structure of the Jews, the word that connects the experience and the concept is the word nachtrĂ€glich, which is used elsewhere by Freud to describe the inherent delay in traumatic experience.
And I think he does a similar thing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the fort-da analysis. This is where he tells the story of the child playing fort-da, âgoneâ and âthere,â and in doing so Freud, himself, goes back and forth with the fort and the da: he says that the game is a game of fort, then that it is a game of da, then that it is a game of fort. Thereâs no obvious reason for him to oscillate like that in his interpretation; he could simply have said, âHereâs a game, we thought it was the pleasure principle, but actually itâs not.â But he doesnât do that. He goes back and forth. So he repeats the game of the child, but he repeats it as something incomprehensible, because he can understand the game of âdaâ as a function of the pleasure principle, but he canât explain the game of âfort.â The theory of trauma, which will derive from this analysis of the game, and the so-called object of this theory, are thus, themselves, bound by what looks like a traumatic structure, which is also the structure of NachtrĂ€glichkeit, or the movement of what appeared to be a da becoming a fort.
From this point of view, the term âtraumaâ itself, as a conceptual marker, repeats, but it doesnât represent; it doesnât even simply signify or refer, according to the principle of any of these traditional structures, as a word and its referent, or a signifier and its signified, or a concept and its object.
The term thus could be said to theorize itself. And thatâs partly why itâs never just a concept, because itâs always moving. In fact, at the point that we get a theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we actually lose the term âNachtrĂ€glichkeit.â He repeats his earlier work where this term appeared, but he repeats it differently. The notion and language of trauma are constantly moving into something different. And itâs also a word thatâs inscribed in a series of texts, for example in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Itâs associated with these figures of departure, such as the âfortâ in the childâs game, which he links to the departure of the childâs mother. Later, when he is trying to explain traumatic repetition, he describes it, essentially, in terms of the mind attempting and failing to return to the moment before the traumatic encounter, a failure that is essentially a departure from the event. Samuel Weber also discusses this inherent âfortâ in trauma that recurs in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and as well in Freudâs description of the beginning of life.3 Or, in other places in Beyond, trauma is associated with the figure of awakening. Or it is associated implicitly with ashes in Freudâs writing on Wilhelm Jensenâs Gradiva, if we look at that text from the perspective of Freudâs later writing.4 The notion of trauma in Freud is inextricable from these figures. So, to return to your question, I donât think the surprise of trauma is ever entirely lost, because any reading of it in context can open it back up again.
Thus, when I was reexamining Freudâs use (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) of a scene from Tassoâs Jerusalem Liberated for the âAfterwordâ to the 20th anniversary edition of Unclaimed Experience, the text opened up in a completely new way.5 If you encounter a good trauma reading, for example in the work of Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max GaudilliĂšreâs History Beyond Trauma, youâll be surprised all over again. They use âmadnessâ more than âtrauma,â but for them theyâre inextricable.6 And the word âtraumaâ still speaks. Itâs nice to go elsewhere than the US. In the US you get more questions like, âShouldnât we be beyond trauma already?â Whereas if you go to other parts of the world, where thereâs a collective, everyday engagement with trauma, theyâre not as concerned with whatâs trendy. The word speaks to them still. But it doesnât have to be the word âtrauma.â In other languages, what happens? In fact, the global context of your collection raises this point. The word âtraumaâ can be traced back to the ancient Greek word for wound, but then it becomes German and French and English. But it doesnât necessarily have to be designated by the same term. And it may need to change in different contexts. So sometimes you may be writing about it, but you donât even need to use the word to convey something thatâs linked to it (though the shift in language may also indicate a shift in experience or ideas).
What, linguistically, are the stakes of trauma? Because one of the problems I have found in recent criticism is that the argument often goes something like this: Trauma is based in the West. Itâs Eurocentric. Itâs colonial. It only comes from one perspective. And therefore we need to go to other cultures to look at trauma. We need to go to other cultures to get at the alterity of trauma in other contexts. So these critics use the same term in English, âtrauma,â to describe what is supposed to be radically different in another language and culture. You can ask about trauma in other cultures but then you immediately have to ask the question: If weâre in another language, shouldnât the word âtraumaâ also have to change? Even if itâs a formerly colonized people who use English, itâs not the same English. So in these criticsâ arguments the word âtraumaâ gets conceptualized; it becomes a simple or stable concept, which is not the case in Freud, or in my writing, for that matter. The concept of trauma, these critics suggest, is âWesternâ or âEuropean,â and so we are supposed to go to a non-Western place to decolonize it, but the same word and concept of âtraumaâ is used to describe what we are supposed to look at in that new context. To me that is a problem. So if thereâs going to be a change in how we think about trauma, we may need to use other names, or we may need to change the structure we are talking about.
At other times critics say: âCaruth keeps mentioning alterity, but she doesnât do the Other.â Okay, fair enough. But of course, then you have to ask: What is the Other? And why is a Western text only Western? And thatâs what I was working on with Tasso.