Bettina Rabelhofer

(Graz)

Inhabiting a Time before Time. Freud’s Concept of Trauma
as a Psychoanalytical Figure of Thought

abstract. At present the term ‘trauma’ seems to be booming as a pattern of cultural interpretation. It connects discourses about medicine, psychoanalysis, art and literary theory, and social history. Today the ruptures and aporias of understanding, representation, communicability and referentiality are discussed in post-structuralist theories of meaning, but it was Freud who created for the first time a readable text about how the repetitious structure of trauma in its paradoxical temporality – the effect stands in as its cause – works as a missed experience at the interface of lives and texts.

Trauma opens up a space beyond the symbolic and interrupts thereby the very process of memory. Both psychoanalysis and literature try to make traumatic experience available for symbolic exchange, not by means of excavating a lost and objectifiable past but by the very act of repeating what otherwise – without the ‘significant other’ – would undergo the crisis of silence.

If «modernity names the moment when the thinking subject can no longer be said to be completely under control or conscious of the actual events that necessarily comprise “his” past»[1], then it was Freud who created for the first time a readable text of this missing experience. Thus memory has become the place where the unexpected and the accidental could happen, threatening the subject’s coherence and continuity. In the face of World War I Freud was startled by the dreams of the war veterans. The dream images were not symbolic; rather they repeated mimetically the battlefield traumas:

Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back to the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright. This astonishes people far too little.[2]

The literal return of these traumatic dreams could no longer be understood as “wish fulfilment” and seemed to lack any unconscious meaning:

[…] it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams we have been discussing which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the dreams during psychoanalyses which bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat, though it is true that in analysis that compulsion is supported by the wish (which is encouraged by “suggestion”) to conjure up what has been forgotten and repressed. Thus it would seem that the function of dreams, which consists in setting aside any motives that might interrupt sleep, by fulfilling the wishes of the disturbing impulses, is not their original function. If there is a “beyond the pleasure principle”, it is only consistent to grant that there was also a time before the purpose of dreams was the fulfilment of wishes.[3]

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud introduces trauma through the notion of a nightmare. The dream reproduces the catastrophe and the shock experience stands for the dissociation of memory from consciousness; the actual event is separated from its understanding. The traumatized individual is possessed by the event and does not gain any control over it. He cannot possess his history. At the core of the nightmares there is a collapse of meaning and a deep uncertainty as to its very truth. The crisis of truth poses the greatest challenge to trauma theory today.

Besides the non-symbolic character of the dreams and flashbacks, Freud was also struck by the belatedness with which the traumatic event haunted the one who had suffered from it, possibly a long time ago. In Moses and Monotheism he refers to this gap of knowing as a period of latency that constitutes a time that lacks the registration of the traumatic event in memory:

It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident – a railway collision, for instance – leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his shock, the concussion or whatever else it was. He now has a “traumatic neurosis”. […] The time that has passed between the accident and the first appearance is described as the “incubation period”, in a clear allusion to the pathology of infectious diseases. […] that might be described as “latency”.[4]

It is because of this very belatedness that the trauma tests the limits of understanding. Freud had already identified the principle of belatedness in his case studies with hysterical patients. He argued that the traumatic interaction takes place between two scenes.

The first scene – consisting of the initial traumatic moment – is not fully emotionally experienced and intellectually understood, but can only be lived through at the time of its occurrence. It cannot be grasped because it comes too early in the child’s development to be assimilated. The second scene – sometimes a rather trivial trigger – could reactivate the first after a period of latency. With regard to sexual child abuse as depicted in the Katharina-case, Freud posits that the actual abuse in childhood has no meaning to the child, even though it has sexual content. It is only after puberty that the adolescent – through a second scene that is in some relation to the first one – realizes the sexual meaning of the first experience. And it is only from this “belated” point that traumatization sets in: It is the second scene that makes the first scene “retrospectively” traumatic. This paradoxical temporality – the effect stands in as its cause – is a radically hermeneutic concept. Through the logic of belatedness, deferred action or retro-determination traumatic experience breaks with common patterns of chronology: the past is belatedly created and may even project itself into the future through the compulsion to repeat. Freud, in his paper on Screen Memories, had already refused purely chronological models of remembering, and memory’s capacity for saving facts “as they were” became subject to the most suspicious examination: «There is in general no guarantee of the data produced by our memory»[5]. – «I can assure you», he says, «that people often construct such things unconsciously – almost like works of fiction»[6]. As to screen memories, an early memory can be used as a screen for a later event or vice versa, according to whether the displacement has occurred in a backward or forward direction:

A screen memory may be described as “retrogressive” or as having “pushed forward” according as the one chronological relation or the other holds between the screen and the thing screened off. […] The whole subject deserves a more thorough examination; but I must content myself with pointing out what complicated processes – processes, incidentally, which are altogether analogous to the formation of hysterical symptoms – are involved in the building up of our store of memories.[7]

Though inhabiting a time before time, we are destined to miss a direct encounter with our own past. The past in general, and in particular if it is traumatic, seems to be beyond the scope of our memory. Psychoanalysis, therefore, would prove itself ineffective if it wanted to restore the subject’s integrity by means of excavating a lost and objectifiable past. Only repetition can commemorate the trauma.

Post-structuralist theories of meaning maintain that trauma is beyond the limits of representation. There is no way to bridge what is so radically torn apart. The ruptures and aporias of understanding, representation, communicability and referentiality have come to form the centre of deconstructive approaches towards trauma. In her paper on Trauma and the Material Signifier Linda Belau warns against giving way to the temptation to idealize traumatic experience as something radically inaccessible:

[…] if trauma’s seeming incomprehensibility has been the paradoxical starting point for one of the most important avenues of its study, it has also invited a dangerous elevation of traumatic experience to the level of an ideal. That is, insofar as it remains beyond our understanding and comprehension, trauma can easily be seen as a sort of exceptional experience. And victims and survivors of trauma, consequently, may be seen as ambassadors of an exceptional realm, bearers of a higher (albeit more terrible) knowledge than is available to the rest of us.[8]

Belau argues that traumatic experience is not in fact inaccessible or untouchable to the degree deconstructivist trauma theory claims. Trauma, to her, inhabits a space beyond the symbolic which is, nevertheless, intimately tied to the materiality of the signifier. Through an analysis of the role of the signifier it could be shown that trauma – in exposing the inadequacy of the signifier – «is an effect of the real that can only be registered negatively in the symbolic». «Therefore», she concludes, «while trauma may belong to the register of the real, it functions in the symbolic»[9]. It is the symbolic where traumatic repetition stages itself.

Trauma opens up a space beyond the symbolic and interrupts thereby the very process of memory. Psychoanalysis and literature both try to make traumatic experience available for symbolic exchange, not by means of excavating a lost past but by the very act of repeating what otherwise – without the “significant other” – would undergo the crisis of silence.

Metaphor and metonymy are two forms of symbolic representation. According to Arnold Modell, a psychoanalyst and professor of clinical  psychiatry, the loss of metaphor as it occurs in post-traumatic states is a «characteristic response to trauma and it threatens the integrity of the self»[10]. Traumatization compels the subject to repeat an unmodified literality from the past without being able to re-categorize or re-contextualize the returning memories. Modell describes this situation in terms of a “frozen metaphor”: «The metaphoric correspondence between past and present is frozen and inflexible. […] Trauma degrades metaphor, and massive trauma degrades metaphor absolutely»[11]. Interrupting the process of symbolization, the traumatic past remains isolated, it cannot become part of the present in such a way that the traumatized individual can reflect on it. Donnel B. Stern, referring to Modell, emphasizes the need for trauma to be linked with current experiences if any sort of “meaning” is to be kept alive:

In trauma, that is, the past exists as a concrete record and cannot be contextualized in the present. Note that this drains meaning from the present, because the present cannot be enriched by association with some portion of the past. But the foreclosing of metaphor also drains meaning from the past – or rather, from the reconstructions of the past that we undertake on the basis of what we learn and experience in the present, a process analogous to what Freud (1895, 1918) called deferred action, or Nachträglichkeit.[12]

By means of our metaphoric imagination, we are able to interpret, displace, and transform our feelings. In metaphor, the meaning of a memory, Stern says, is carried over or “transferred” to a present experience and also becomes part of the “emotional categories”. The self also needs to be continually re-contextualized in an affective dimension. When such metaphoric transfer takes place trauma can be reflected on.

There is also an interesting relationship between transference (in the psychoanalytical sense of the term) and metaphor. Psychotic reference lacks symbolism and flattens any metaphors to a plain concretism[13]. Stern gives the following example:

[…] my analyst is my father; no other interpretation will do. Clinical relatedness is much more viable, of course, if the transference is (again in the old-school term) neurotic: I feel that my analyst is like my father, but I continue to recognize that analyst and father are separate. Transference is clinically useful when its meaning is metaphorical; transference is problematic, on the other hand, when it is a literal equivalence.

Transference will not collapse when there is an “as if” which creates the potential for metaphor:

To feel as if my father is my analyst, I must feel that the two people are alike in some key respect. In other words, the as if kind of transference requires me to have created a category in which father and analyst both belong. But the creation of a category is based on more than the identification of similarities between its items; a category is also defined by its items’ differences from one another. Without the differences to separate the members of a category, it would not be a category at all, but would instead simply collapse back into equivalences.[14]

Metaphor, for this reason, is not purely a linguistic phenomenon but synonymous with symbolic function. Trauma that has not yet become part of a metaphor does not belong to a category either. Remaining in isolation as a “singularity”, as a thing in itself, it cannot be known or emotionally felt. According to Stern, it «seems […] that the process of creating associative links between otherwise separate experiences is crucial to psychic growth»[15]. The literalness of language makes memory impossible. – «Take metaphor out of language and there is no memory, no history, left»[16]. If an experience lacks all reference points it stays empty and can only be represented as a loss, gap or void. Dori Laub uses the term “empty circle” for this «latent, but powerful and ever-present feeling of nothingness»[17] after one of his analytic patients had told him a dream which occurred in the fifth year of her analysis. The short version of it runs as follows:

[T]here was an “empty circle”; she knew that her position could be related to that circle. Exactly where she was, she did not know, but she felt her reference to it. Many things distracted her from looking at it.[18]

Through the absence of categories the dream experience as well as the real trauma experience is surrounded by timelessness and ubiquity. Without time and place the traumatic event is «outside the range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of comprehension, of recounting and of mastery»[19]. Trauma blocks the conversion into narrative. Whereas narrating our life stories is a social act, related to a particular addressee and adapted to the interests of the present, traumatic memory remains untouched by time and cannot be recounted verbally. It is encapsulated in the body and cut off from consciousness and the understanding “other”:

The feelings of absence, of rupture, and of the loss of representation that essentially constitute the traumatic experience all emerge from the real failure of the empathic dyad at the time of the traumatisation and the resulting failure to preserve an empathic tie even with oneself.[20]

When faith in human responsiveness has to be entirely given up – «[t]he executioner does not heed the victim’s plea for life and relentlessly proceeds with the execution»[21] – also the internal dialogue within the victim is destroyed, as intra-psychically there is no longer «a matrix of two people, a self and a resonating other»[22]. Therefore the presence of a listener is of essential importance to restore the empathic tie within the survivor herself.

Literature and psychoanalysis can provide a kind of transitional space for a responsive presence to make up for the tremendous loss of empathy during traumatization.

Donald W. Winnicott[23] holds that our fear of death is indissolubly linked to our earliest experiences of loneliness, helplessness and separation. The infant’s separation anxieties from her first carer, usually the mother, cause her unbearable pain and suffering that cannot be processed properly by the immaturity of her psyche. Transitional objects like blankets and teddy bears help the child to have a fantasized bond with the mother as she gradually separates. But language too can serve as a defence against anxiety.

Freud gave an impressive example watching his grandson playing a game of departure and return:

The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o”. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [“there”]. This, then, was the complete game – disappearance and return.[24]

In his “fort”-“da” game, the little boy has created a transitional symbolic space between his mother and himself which allows him to maintain the mother-child bond by staging her departure and her coming back as well. By means of the reel the boy could stand separateness while remaining symbolically connected to his mother’s embrace.

The same takes place when the analyst attempts to restore or reconstruct a patient’s damaged early self through holding and transitional relatedness, emphasizing a renewed process of self-creation. Like the child’s play, the psychoanalytical process could thus be the basis for creativity.

By means of words as transitional objects the little boy could bridge the otherwise empty space between himself and his mother, between the self and the world. The significance of the transitional object lies in the child’s passing from the pre-symbolic to the symbolic. Thus, the fort-da-game could be conceived as a primal scene of poetry. It connects and separates, at the same time, the child’s inner world from the external reality. In Freud’s terms, the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle takes place. In the intermediate area of the game, both primary and secondary processes coexist simultaneously. The child’s text is a symbolic object in the psychoanalytical sense and eases his way into reality and separation while playfully investigating its linguistic and symbolic capacities respectively. As long as you can hide in the intermediate area of play or poetic language (and as may also be the case with the holding containment in the psychoanalytic process) death cannot get you, because it is always ‘out there’ in the realm where you are not[25]. Death-camp survivors are reported to have concen-trated on exercise books or torn sheets of paper as transitional objects (and therefore stabilizing devices) when gradually meaning was withdrawn from the last remains of life around them. The uttering of words, rhythms or the singing of a melody defers the notion of death. Silence, in this respect, would work as a linguistic substitute for death and emptiness.

When meaning is radically lost and the internal other is utterly absent, art could keep up the illusion of a responsive presence. Art does not “communicate” meanings, but it generates them in receptive minds:

In art and literature a connection can be restored that can oppose and defy the abandonment of listening and communication that characterises trauma. Art has the ability to revive the enshrouded past of a trauma through a dialogue in the present. In creating a holding, witnessing “other” that confirms the reality of the traumatic event, the artist can provide a structure or presence that counteracts the loss of the internal other, and thus can bestow form on chaos.[26]

Bestowing form on chaos means in some way unfolding a story that provides some formal containment for a plot that otherwise would iterate the psychic pain by inexorably and insensibly repeating itself. “Story” as well as Anna O.’s “talking cure” could, therefore, be regarded as a linguistic remedy, whereas plot or “unstory” prolongs the pain without the healing power of a narrative mode. Ruth Leys, in her book about the genealogy of trauma, links “unstory” versus “story” to the terms “mimesis” and “die-gesis”[27]. Diegetic modes of representation are a step towards de-traumati-zation, as narrating is always a kind of “working through” and therefore can provide a conscious, psychic and intellectual processing of trauma[28].

Literature may connect “unstory” to “story”, and by doing so, it also connects the shattered pieces of a broken temporality, so that the past can be laid to rest. Ghost stories[29] represent a paradigmatic embodiment of the disjunction of temporality, since the spectre – as a variant of the return of the repressed – keeps haunting the present as long as the traumatic event has not been fully assimilated. To be bound to replay the past is to be caught in a traumatic repetition compulsion which suspends the temporal process by the tantalizing instinctual play of the death drive. Remembering and “working through” in opposition to “acting out” tries to escape this curse of reproduction. Repetition is inherently ambivalent. If it is the matrix for altering what is repeated, it could be a potentially progressive act. Thus the little boy’s fort-da game stages the passage from trauma to recovery. It can be regarded as an attempt to create patterns of constancy. Such constancy allows something to remain stable. Although art and play work against the compulsion to repeat, insofar as they serve as symbolic enactments (they actualize the past in symbolic form), they employ repetition as a means of difference and change, so that it can be replayed to a more successful outcome.

Peter Brooks suggests that «repetition in its literary manifestations may in fact work as a “binding”, a binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form […] within the energetic economy of the narrative»[30]. «Serviceable form», according to Brooks, means “perceptible” form. These perceptible formalizations – be they repetitions, similarities, or contrasting elements – create «a delay, a postponement in the discharge of energy, a turning back from immediate pleasure, to ensure that the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more complete»[31]. The boy’s “o-o-o-o” while playing his fort-da game of departure and return could be seen as the vocal equivalent of the pain that the delay of the happy ending, his mother’s coming back, causes. The first part of the game, the throwing away of the spool into the infant’s cot, retards the pleasure principle’s search for the gratification of discharge, but, nevertheless is filled with forepleasure, awaiting the second part of the game, the mother’s return, and welcoming it with a joyful “da”. «The most effective or, at least, the most challenging texts», Brooks says, «may be those that are most delayed, most highly bound, most painful»[32].

The boy’s desire has taken shape in the symbolic enactment of his wishful play; in the same symbolic way literary texts become the fictional playground for the traces of our (past) desire. The same is true of transference in the psychoanalytic process.

In Brooks’ words, the transference, like the literary text,

becomes the peculiar space of a deadly serious play, in which effect, repeated from the past, is acted out as if it were present, yet eventually in the knowledge that the persons and relations involved are surrogates and mummers. The transference actualizes the past in symbolic form, so that it can be replayed to a more successful outcome.[33]

All literature, as circumlocutory it might be, is heading towards this outcome.

References

Belau, Linda: Trauma and the Material Signifier. 2001,1, LINK.

Brooks, Peter: Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative: Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984.

Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis 2001, pp. 7-64.

Freud, Sigmund: Screen Memories. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psychoanalytic Publications. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis 2001, pp. 301-322.

Freud, Sigmund: Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XXIII (1937-1939): Moses and Monotheism. An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Other Works. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis 2001, pp. 1-13.

Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse: «From Concretism to Metaphor: Thoughts on Some Theoretical and Technical Aspects o the Psychoanalytic Work with Children of Holocaust Survivors», Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 39 (1984), pp. 301-319.

Laub, Dori and Daniel Podell: Art and Trauma. In: International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1995) 76, p. 991-1005.

Laub, Dori: Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening. In: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (ed.): Testimony. Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York and London: Routledge 1992, pp. 57-74.

Laub, Dori: On Holocaust Testimony and Its «Reception» within Its Own Frame, as a Process in Its Own Right. A Response to «Between History and Psychoanalysis» by Thomas Trezise. In: History and Memory, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2009), pp. 127-150.

Leys, Ruth: Trauma. A genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000.

Modell, Arnold H. (2003): Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Newmark. Kevin: Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the shock of laughter. In: Cathy Caruth (ed.): Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP 1995, pp. 236-255.

Rose, Gilbert J: Necessary Illusion: Art as “Witness”. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press 1996.

Rose, Jacqueline: «Daddy». In: Sylvia Plath. Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom. Updated edition. (= Bloom’s Modern Critical Views). New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism 2007, p. 28.

Schwab, Gabriele: The Intermediate Area Between Life and Death: On Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. In: Memory and Desire. Aging – Literature – Psychoanalysis. Edited by Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, pp. 204-217.

Stern, Donnel B. (2009): Shall the Twain Meet? Metaphor, Dissociation, and Cooccurrence. In: Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 29:1, pp. 79-90.

Wald, Christina: Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia. Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2007.

Whitehead, Anne: Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2004, chapter «The past as revenant», pp. 12-29.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971): Playing and reality. New York: Routledge.