How are we to âinterpretâ psychic traumas which appear to defy meaning and language? Traumatic wounds are by definition unspeakable. Yet from the earliest of literature, we find tales of primal trauma which tell of a certain catharsis through storytelling and touch. And we witness a special role played in such tales by figures called âwounded healers.â By way of exploring this cathartic paradox of âtelling the untellable,â I will look at some examples from both classical Greek mythology and contemporary literature (including Freudian psychoanalysis, Joycean fiction and Holocaust testimony).
My basic hypothesis is that while traumatic wounds cannot be cured, they can at times be healedâand that such healing may take place through a twin therapy of (1) narrative catharsis and (2) carnal working-through. In short, healing by word-touch. A double transformation of incurable wounds into healable scars.
Originary stories of wounding
I begin with some Greek tales of wounded healersâOdysseus, Oedipus, and Chiron.
Odysseus
In Homerâs Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is condemned to act out the wound of his own inherited failure, his own existential finitude, again and again. The name Odysseus means âbearer of painâ and we learn during the course of the poem that he is carrying wounds both suffered and inflicted by his forebears. Indeed, the ultimate act of recognition when Odysseus returns to Ithaca coincides with the exposure of his childhood scar, identified by his nurse Euryclea. The poem begins with Odysseus absenting himself from the wounds of his birth and upbringing, his autochthonous origins in Ithaca, sailing off to heroic glory. But his attempts to become an immortal warrior are constantly thwarted by reminders of his mortality (the brutal carnage of Troy and subsequent calamities and failures). The decisive rupture of the lure of Calypso is central to this disillusionmentâOdysseus chooses earthly nourishment over godly ambrosia.
Originally leaving Ithaca as an aspirant hero, Ulysses returns as a beggar: a lowly outcast finally recognized by the smell of his flesh (by his dog, Argos) and the touch of a scar on his thigh (by his nurse, Euryclea). It is significant that Euryclea only touches her masterâs scar after a very detailed narrative about how Ulysses received the original wound in a childhood hunting incident with his grandfather, Autolycus (Odyssey 19.393â469)âa typical example of transgenerational trauma.1 The narrative âworking throughâ leading up to the Eurycleaâs touch, takes all of seventy-seven lines. The climactic moment of ârecognitionâ (anagnorisis), in short, takes the form of a double catharsis of narrativity and tactility. The hero comes to final self-knowledge by both acknowledging and embodying the story of his own primal wounding.
Telemachus, expecting a triumphant victor to return, does not at first recognize his own father. He is so fixated on his great expectations of the paterfamilias that he does not see the wound on his body. The son is blinded by illusory imagos, and delusions abound until he finally acknowledges, sharing food in a swineherdâs (Eumaeusâ) hut, that the mortified stranger before him is in fact his real father. Tasting simple fruits of the earth is how they finally come together as host and guest: hospitality as antidote to the hostile curse of fate (ate).
The word Homer uses for âscarâ in this final recognition episode is oulen (Odyssey 19.391). It is a term often associated in Greek literature with âtrauma,â as in Platoâs Gorgias, 524c, âoulas en to somati ⊠hypo traumaton,â where oulen means both âtraceâ and âscar.â While the wound is timeless, the scar appears in time: It is a carnal trace which can change and alter over time though it never disappears. Scars are written on the body; they are forms of proto-writing. And narrative catharsis is a process of working through such carnal traces. Put simply: While the wounds remain timeless and non-representable, scars are the marks left on the flesh to be seen and touched, told and read. Scars are engraved wounds that may, or may not, be healed.2
What I am suggestingâfollowing Aristotleâs notion of mythos-mimesis in the Poeticsâis that certain kinds of narrative may bring about a catharsis of our most basic passions, through a âthe purgation of pity and fear.â But such healing is to be understood in a very specific mannerânot as facile closure or completion but as open-ended story: namely, as a storytelling which forever fails to cure trauma but never fails to try to heal it. As Samuel Beckettâs unnamable narrator puts it: âI canât go on, Iâll go on.â And in the very effort to narrate the unnarratable, there is, curiously, not only therapeutic caring but pleasure: the pleasurable purgation of pity and fear by pity and fear.3 More precisely, we interpret the role of narrative catharsis here as a twofold transformation of the passions (pathemata)ânamely, the distilling of (1) pathological pity (elias) into compassion and (2) of pathological fear (phobos) into serenity. Compassion spells a proper way of being ânearâ to pain; serenity a proper way of remaining âfarâ from it (keeping a healthy distance, as we say, lest we over-identify or fuse with the otherâs pain). Catharsis, according to Aristotle, makes for healthy citizens. Purged emotions lead to practical wisdom.
Oedipus
Now to my second storyâOedipus. It has been noted by LĂ©vi-Strauss and others that the proper names for Oedipus and his patrilineal ancestors all refer to âwoundsâ which cause difficulty in walking: Labdacos (lame), Laios (left-sided), Oedipus (swollen footed). Each of these figures acts out the crimes and wounds of the previous generation: Laios raped the son of his host, Pelops, thereby committing the equivalent of incest and the betrayal of hospitality. His double transgression replicates the curse (ate) of his own father, Labdacos, and is repeated by Oedipus in the next generation. This fatal trans-generational lineage comes under the heading of the âHouse of Labdacosâ and involves a recurring acting out of unspoken traumata (Greek for wounds).
This recurrence of trauma (inflicted or suffered) takes place over three generations, and the only solution to this curse of cyclical repetition is, it appears, the conversion of the untold wound into a form of enacted storytellingâin this case, the symbolic emplotment of Oedipusâ tragic narrative. Only this, according to LĂ©vi-Strauss, can affect a cathartic transformation of passions which suspends the compulsive acting out of trauma. The basic thesis, in sum, is that myths are machines for the purging of wounds: strategies for resolving at a symbolic level what remains irresolvable at the level of lived empirical experience. (Oedipusâ self-blinding at his own hands is another aspect of wounding-into-wisdom, as the blind healer Tiresias also reminds us. The double sense of blesser as blessing and wounding captures this).
Let me briefly unpack LĂ©vi-Straussâ argument. Human existence is cursed by a tragic, because impossible, desire to escape the trauma of our autochthonous origins. Namely, the desire to buck our finitudeâto deny death. (As Levinas puts it, âlâexistence est notre traumatisme originelâ). In the Oedipus cycle, this tragic curse is epitomized, as noted, by the patrilineal names for wounds that bind us to the earth. And the poetic role of muthos-mimesisâthat comprises drama for Aristotleâis to narrate both our heroic desire to transcend our terrestrial nature and our mortal inability to do so! Our effort to surmount our earthly finitude is repeatedly acted out in our overcoming of monsters: Cadmos kills the dragon, Oedipus defeats the Sphinx. But these attempts to overcome mortality are ultimately impossible for we are scarred by irreconcilable fidelities: to both earth and sky, to immanence and transcendence, matter and spirit, nature and culture. So for LĂ©vi-Strauss, great mythic narrativesâbeginning with the synchronic myths of la pensĂ©e sauvageâare attempts to procure cathartic relief by balancing these binary opposites in symbolic constellations or âmythemes.â In a word: What is impossible in reality becomes possible in fiction.4
Let us return to the plot. Oedipus finally comes to a recognition of his traumatic finitudeâand the transgenerational crimes of his forebearsâthrough a series of woundings culminating in the removal of his eyes. This ultimately leads, not to curing (that is impossible, the eyes are gone forever), but to a certain cathartic healing through:
1 a new kind of vision (he sees differently);
2 a new kind of touching (as he is led by the hand of Antigone); and
3 a new kind of speaking: his final words at Colonus where he accepts his estranged outsider status as a mortal human being.
Oedipusâ wound has finally become a scar, a witness for later generations to recall. His empty tomb serves as a talisman for Athens. (We might recall here, apropos of Oedipusâ wounding-into-wisdom that those who remind him of his errant wandering and send him back to Ithaca are the blind Tiresias and the ghost of his dead mother. It is two wounded healers who guide Odysseus home to be healed by the touch and testimony of Eurycleaâthe nursemaid who bathes his childhood scar and narrates the origin of his wound).
Chiron
The woundings of Odysseus and Oedipus recall a whole series of other wounded healers in Greek mythology, from Tiresius and Cassandra to Philoctetes and Chiron. I confine myself here to the last of theseâChiron.
Chiron was a demi-god and centaur, half man and half horse. He was the son of the Titan, Kronos (Saturn) and the love-nymph, Philyra, and was wounded by Herakles during a boar hunt when a poisoned arrow pierced his leg and would not heal. Though Chiron could not cure himself, he found that he could cure others and became known as a wise and compassionate healer. Those who came to him in his underground cave found understanding and compassion. In his wounded presence, they felt more whole and well, which is why they called him âthe wounded healer.â5 Because his wound was incurable and unbearably painful, Chiron voluntarily relinquished his immortality and underwent death, eventually being assigned a place among the stars as the constellation Centaurus.
Interestingly Chiron became the teacher of Asclepius, one of the two founders of Western medicine, the other being Hippocrates. Chiron, who dwelt in a cave, taught Asclepius the art of healing through (1) touch (Chiron means hand, kheir, or more precisely, skilled with the hands, the word kheirourgas means surgeon) and (2) song (Chiron used music along with healing herbs from the earth and induced dreams). By contrast, Hippocrates, the other patron of western medicine, followed the way of Zeus, Chironâs brother, who dwelt on Mount Olympus and promoted a method of superintendence and control. In short, while Asclepius promoted healing through carnal nature and nocturnal dreaming from below, Hippocrates promoted curing through inspection and intervention from above. The former worked through taste, touch, and fantasy; the latter through cognitive management.
There are further things to be noted about Chiron. As a hybrid of human and animal form, he is a half-creature who reconnects with our deeper unconscious feelings and earth belonging. As son of not only Chronus (saturnine melancholy) but Philyra (love), Chiron suggests another approach to the compulsive and often violent repetitions of âchronologicalâ timeâhe prefers an art of loving care, inherited from his mother of that name (philia). And this opens up to another kind of time, a time after time, aprĂšs-coup, nachtraglichâa healing repetition not backward but forward, which permits a break from cyclical recurrence and a release into the future. Unlike his brother Zeus who continues the periodic blood c...