Frued
Interpretation as a tool of recognizing resistance: “He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”
- trauma as engine of activism
- the paradox of knowing (epistemic)
- feminist movements being extracted to protect men/attack women
- legislative theatre & the way in which it reenacts trauma
- remembering trauma — gaps in memory, lack of trust
- culture as power; power in community and keeping it aliveCaruth
- Literacy in dreams, hallucinations etc. that possesses the receiver and resists psychoanalytic interpretation and cure.
“Such a crisis of truth extends beyond the question of individual cure and asks how we in this era can have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access.” — The paradox of knowing.
- “The greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, that immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness.”
- By carrying that impossibility of knowing out of the empirical event itself, trauma opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility.
- trauma’s contagion, how to not only to listen for the event, but listen to its departure (the role of the therapeutic listener)
- Trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures (though our ability to listen to the departures we have all taken from ourselves)
- trauma “does not simply serve as record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned” (161). Her writing talks about accident victims forming “waking memory” that is “returned, repeatedly, only in the form of a dream” (162) and a flashback as “having no place” either in the past, where it was not fully experienced, or the present, where it is not fully understood (163).
- Integration: Its translation into narrative memory might lose the precision and force that characterizes the traumatic event.
- The danger of speech: whether is it not a sacrilege of the traumatic experience to play with the reality of the past?
- ” a crisis that is not yet over”