cyh371@nyu.edu
Trauma in Memory, Memory in Trauma
1. Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” talks mainly about how patients in psychological therapies can unconsciously releasing emotions or carry out actions stemming from their memory instead of consciously recalling. Freud called this phenomenon “repeating”, claiming that only by making patients repeatedly present such behavior in the “playground” – a safe, intimate space shared by the therapist and the patient only – under the effect of “transference (a shift in the object of from to the professional ‘third person’” can they genuinely overcome their resistances with skillful guidance from the therapist. (1924: 154) The reason why the patient resists, or to be more specific, why “he does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out”, was not clearly stated, but from the examples Freud proposed, they might be defined as “trauma” which patients might experience, such as parents’ authority, infantile sexual research, and shame for certain sexual activities. (150)
Interestingly, Paul Geltner, the author of Emotional Communication, mentioned the interesting notion of “inter-personalization” and “inter-subjectivity” which transference contains in his open talk at Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center in 2014. “Something the patient was carrying around internally has now become part of the new relationship.” In other words, “repeating” is never a thing that was done alone; furthermore, its object (the therapist) can actually be a subject rather than object, since he/she plays the role of counselling, no matter how passive this counselling might be. I reckon this can be added to the Freud’s theory of repeating.
Memory can be acted out even it is not consciously remembered.
2. Caruth appealed that PTSD cannot be viewed as merely a pathological diagnosis; instead, its content should be explored more deeply. Two stages of traumatic experiences exist in her discourse: firstly, when an impactful event occurs, due to its shocking nature, the involved should be in the status of numbness and stagnation, unable to fully absorb or digest the situation; secondly, after a moment of delay, fragments of the event would pour into the survivor’s mind, haunting and possessing the survivor while the latter usually owns no agency to avoid them. Peculiarly, these fragmental memories are likely to convey explicit details of the event itself through the form of “intrusive thoughts, nightmares, or flashbacks”. (1995: 152) This “paradoxical coexist” is what Caruth named “the elision of memory and the precision of recall” (1995: 153). Moreover, traumatic memory cannot be forcedly organized into narrative memory because it “may lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall”. (153)
Trauma was experienced incompletely but distinctly recalled in pieces of details.
Truth of Never Being the Same, but Healing is Still a Must
3. Van der Kolk thoroughly explained how different parts of the brain normally collect and process sensory information into an integrated information group, and how the strong emotional impact brought by trauma can interfere this neurobiological procedure permanently. Increase in stress hormones than usual is likely to cause traumatized individuals to react vigilantly even to ordinary events. “When recovery is blocked, the body is triggered to defend itself.” In most cases, our mammal brain will adjust to mode of fight-or-flight whenever we encounter threat, but if this threat is too overwhelming for it to tackle, the reptilian brain, “the ultimate emergency system”, would take over control by “depersonalization”, which is inactivating all kinds of perception and shutting down awareness. In other words, victims detach their sense of self leading to incapacity of feeling and understanding anything. What’s worse, if this situation of numbing continues, “it is likely to reach what Van der Kolk declared that an organism could not “nurture, care, and love.” To break free from such a hopeless future, Van der Kolk emphasized that social support is essential since as human, we need to be ‘truly heard and seen by the people around us”.
Trauma can irreversibly alter the neural system negatively.
4. Herman’s approach to trauma is special because it is disparate from Freud, Caruth, and Van der Kolk who more or less discussed it from the aspect of psychoanalyst. Her book “Truth and Repair” centers around the ideology of “justice”, debating that in the case of those who suffer from domestic and sexual abuse, mostly women and children, could not receive adequate understanding and protection from the court due to its outdated patriarchal design of system. This system seems to rather pursue absolute rationality than admittance of the harmed’s reasonable rage and grief. As Herman stated, “the state, not the victim, is actually considered as the injured party”; nonetheless ironically, following such logic, the state has not taken responsibility for what the perpetrator had done either. It seems to be unfair to assume that the state plays only the role of the harmed but not the harming.
What is worth mentioned, despite desperate perspectives between Van der Kolk and Herman, they both stressed the significance for survivors to build connections with others. Herman even classified what is necessary for not only victims’ healing but also social improvement into two categories: one is fulfilling of justice, which are acknowledgement from both the close ones, the public and the perpetrator, apology from and accountability on the perpetrator exclusively; the other is stages of healing, including restitution and rehabilitation from trauma for the perpetrated, and prevention of the same tragedy happening again.
Even the severity of trauma can be measured based on the victim’s identity.
Collective Inheritance of Memory and/or Trauma
5. “Memory” here is no longer individual experiences analyzed in the clinic room but a common tradition, custom, courtesies or so on shared by a certain group of people. While distinguishing memory practices into “incorporating” and “inscribing”, chapter 3 “Bodily Practices” in “How Societies Remember” by Connerton concentrates on “incorporated” practices, claiming that the weightiness of bodily embodiment has long been underestimated owing to its “traceless” nature (1989: 102) after the appearance of written characters: “inscribing practices have always formed the privileged story, incorporating practices the neglected story.” (100, 101) From the examples of ceremonies, proprieties and techniques of the body provided in the text, it can be implied that bodily practices requires cognitive and habit-memory that is never easy to achieve. (87)
Memory is carefully practiced as the unseen heritage of culture.
6. Hirsch, the author of “The Generation of Postmemory”, defines the “post” in postmemory as the successive generation of the older generation who underwent a great traumatic even, Holocaust particularly in her studies; the former inherited the memory told as stories from the latter. Stories should be recognized as a presentation of memory instead of memory, “emanations” according to Hirsch’s quotation from Hoffman. (2012: 31) Furthermore, she is the only one among all mentioned scholars who brought up the importance of visual culture, especially photographs, in the transmission of memory and postmemory. She also suggested some functions of photographs have, for example they can be a tool to “reanimate” the past (36), an “icon” able to symbolize a historical event (37), and a “projection” which both minimize and magnify the event they caught (38).
Memory of trauma can be passed down by not only tales but also images.
Performance
All the analyzed hypotheses about memory and trauma above did not exactly mention the term of “performance”; nevertheless, presentation of “performance” in the broad sense can still be seen in between the lines. In fact, it can be said that the discourse itself by the authors has already been a type of performative utterance but owing to irrelevancy this will not be discussed here. The meaning of “performance” in this case should be a person’s/people’s behavior, action, or even emotion rather than a carefully arranged and repeatedly practiced play, dance, or concert. To be more specific, performance in Freud’s, Van der Kolk’s, and Connerton’s hypotheses seems to be presented in the form of “reenactment”; it is noteworthy that the content of reenactment varies from theory to theory. In general, reenactment is the most correspondent to its definition in Cambridge Dictionary as “try to make it (the event) happen again in exactly the same way that it happened the first time” under Connerton’s theoretical structure as he focuses on the inheritance of ritual and cultural bodily practices. As for under that of Freud and Van der Kolk, “repeating” in the former does not show exactly the same way by shifting the object of emotional release, while the “event” in the latter is not the traumatic event but the physical presentation of the victims under the effect of trauma.
Assistance in Personal Work
Despite no professional degree in fine arts, music or performing arts, I have always been indulging myself in courses that require making of creative projects at school. In the process of searching for inspiration for my work, I found that I am easily attracted to the idea of “things that bring sense of despair/trauma” or “the accumulation of past creates the expression of present”. For instance, when it comes to my favorite anime series, Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Attack on Titan, the key plots in their stories can be said to exactly show the former (greatly recommended to watch in person); as for the latter, I did a virtual art installation for a creative practice course during undergrad exchange which aimed at conveying how my home country “Taiwan” becomes its democratic and free presence now with the history of colonization and suppression. Despite the clear purport of this work above, occasionally I did not transform this purport into the practice thoroughly enough because of inability to fully grasp its spirit and hence the final result seems to be a bit shallow. However, studying the above theories about memory and trauma greatly assists in organization of inspirational sources. If I have the chance to redo my work, I will probably refer to not only the history itself but also the emotional aspect as well, for instance looking into documentaries that record testimonies from the current people or even literary pieces that contains subjective expressions. As for personal tastes in anime, I would daringly assume that it somehow fits the “more pain bringing more pleasure” suggested by Van der Kolk; yet to be honest I do not know how I should react to this realization, since it is likely that I might already experience the alternation which trauma in my past gave me.