cyh371@nyu.edu
In Remembering, Repeating and Working Through, to begin with, Freud constructed the framework of the chapter that explores the process of a proper psychotherapy nowadays should be a ground that the patient recount his/her experiences and thoughts, while the therapist never offer a guidance for finding causes due to the latter’s possibly misleading subjectivity. However, when patients are required to talk about themselves, they actually often have nothing to say, or present a sense of uncertainty that whether they have anything to say, in the beginning of the treatment session. In other cases, they might express specific emotions or perform specific actions to the therapist, which Freud defined it as “repeating” under the effect of “transference”. Repeating can be recognized as presentation of behavior or action by people unable to “remember” certain memory, traumatic mostly. Furthermore, this repeating, in a therapeutic process, has an object, the therapist, to project; in other words, the patient transferred his/her object of expression from the one who brought trauma to the therapist. In Paul Geltner’s open session about this chapter, he used the term “interpersonalized”, very precise from my perspective, to describe the transformation from one-sided (the patient’s) enactment of memory to two-sided relationship built by such sort of abreaction between the patient and the therapist.
On the other hand, Caruth discussed how traumatic memory cannot be viewed in the same pattern of how narrative memory works. She started by giving brief introduction about PTSD, setting the base tone that trauma has never been just about the tragic incident itself; it contains the victims’ long-term mental reflection toward this incident. In addition, she also proposed that the formation and conception of trauma should be explored from fields other than pathology, literature, politics, sociology, to name a few. For instance, in Taiwan, collective trauma from the political repression during the 20th century can be seen in a lot of contemporary films, artwork and even video games, which cannot be easily analyzed from merely psychoanalytical aspect. Here, I personally recommend a video game called Detention whose background takes place in the 1950s Taiwan under the threat of White Terror. Back to the theme, Caruth has gone to quite a length to explain the condition of traumatic memory: first, some part of the event is recorded by the brain, but the record itself is even more incomplete, which means that the memory itself is unconsciously encoded, and this encoding is unresolved; second, whenever an element of the event appears and is recognized by the victim, a flashback appears, usually with unusually clear sensory details; third, not only is the traumatic memory not accurately recalled and controlled by the victim, it is an “unrecountable and thus somehow non-existent history,” and it continues to affect the victim mentally. Despite such difficulty to understand others’ trauma, Caruth stressed that listening is still essential and only by doing so can people get a peek in the incident and the impact this incident led to, thinking about how traumatic history can be not repeated. In this way, including trauma into the realm of pathology actually assists other academic realms as well.
When I was reading two essays, I found some interesting similarities Freud’s and Caruth’s dissertations share. For instance, they both mentioned a particular phenomenon that is “gap in memory”, or “amnesia”. Freud claimed that this gap should be absence of particular parts of a greater whole of memory, often stemming from “resistance”, a kind of mentally protective operation keeping somebody from harmful feelings, thoughts, or fantasies (Geltner). It can be said that Freud built a linear connection between resistance and “forgotten” memory. In my opinion, I would compare this “resistance” with a “dike with tiny holes”, while “memory” as “water”; the thin trickles flowing out of the dike can be seen as the fragments of memory leading to repetition. As for Caruth, rather than attempt to define and clarify where this “gap” exactly came from, it is likely that she sees it as a natural happening when it comes to traumatic experiences: the contradiction between“the elision of memory” , and “the precision of recall”. When Nevertheless, this personal “dike theory” can in fact be applied to part of Caruth’s trauma hypothesis as well: tiny streams of water play a role of sharp pieces of memory that might bring about “flashback”, while the dike can be either the numbness victims felt when the incident occurred, or again, Freud’s discourse of “resistance”.