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For Cathy Caruth, in the “Introduction” of Recapturing the Past, trauma “registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned” (151). That means, for her, that trauma “has no [temporal] place” in a person’s mind; it is an event that, “in its unexpectedness or horror,” cannot be “fully integrated as it occurred” and “thus continually returns” (153). So, in her first introduction to Trauma, she explains that the event returns in the form of “intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from” it (4). He draws especially from Freud, for whom the “repressed” is “acted out” instead of being remembered (150).

Freud does not speak directly about trauma. He refers to events that get repressed in the minds of his patients: a “special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered” (149). This goes in hand with Bessel van der Kolk’s definition. For him, trauma is what “is unbearable and intolerable” (14): it is a horror that overwhelms and breaks down the system of a person (211).

Defining trauma, then, is not so much about the event but its impressions on the person who lived it. Who knows what can leave trauma: trauma is always the experience after the event. Maybe, for this reason, it is so crucial for Judith Hermon to highlight that trauma, even if it was lived individually, is always communal: “If trauma shames and isolates, the recovery must take place in community (…) [it] cannot be simply a private, individual matter” (8-9).

Traumatic events can be recognized: rapes, abuses, wars, kidnappings, or even patriarchy, as Hermon claims. However, to speak of trauma is almost always to speak of recovery and, therefore, of memory: the aim of his work, according to Freud, “is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression” (148).

This, perhaps, is the most complex part of the traumatic process, for as van der Kolk explains, traumatized people tend “to lose all memories of the event in question, only to regain access to them in bits and pieces at much later date” (209). The event does not usually remain organized as a “coherent logical narrative” in the person but as “fragmented sensory and emotional traces” (211). More poetically, Caruth depicts trauma as “a repeated suffering of the event, but also a continual leaving of the site” (10).

In any case, if retrieving the memory is part of the patient’s recovery, it is understandable that Hermon advocates the need for the process to be communal since the patient requires a safe place, where they feel protected, to be able to access these memories (8). She understands that healing is a work that requires “the radical act of listening” and is linked to a process of imparting justice (9-10). To heal is to listen and, at the same time, to point out what is producing trauma.

Again, remembering is not easy. That is why Marianne Hirsch, in “The Generation of Postmemory,” reminds us that memory is not necessarily individual and can be transmitted from one generation to the next (35). Especially in cases of systematic or extreme violence, such as war, traumatic memory can be transmitted through stories or objects, such as a photograph. Perhaps, if the repressed is “acted out,” memories can also be transmitted through bodily movements.

In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton explains that there are two ways of preserving versions of the past. 1) “Inscribing practices,” which are those that record memories, such as texts, films, or photographs. And 2) “incorporating practices,” those that are transmitted from one person to another through bodily activity, whether consciously, as when someone is taught to swim, or unconsciously, as when someone learns by example when to smile or not to smile in a conversation (72-73). In this sense, for Connerton, the body retains many memories, especially those related to habits. Habits are culturally constructed and, therefore, transmit memories (104). The body, one might conclude, is “sedimented” with traumatic memories that are not necessarily its own.

If the body performs memories, both repressed, according to Freud, and culturally transmitted, according to Connerton, studying the performances of bodies as archives of trauma can perhaps help heal personal and collective traumas as well. Van der Kolk explains how art, especially theater and music, helps to heal patients from their traumas (251). However, performance implies something broader than an artistic process: here, performance is what is acted without being conscious of the acting; it is the learned, the habitual, the movements that are made without thinking.

Thus, the study of trauma is also the study of the performances of trauma: of how the body “acts out” the repressed memories of a specific event. Nevertheless, what happens when the event does not end? For Hermon, a safe and nonviolent space is necessary for the recovery. But she even acknowledges that that place can be challenging to attain: if patriarchy is a system that traumatizes people, how can one possibly start the recovery living within it?

Petrona de la Cruz Cruz’s play A Desperate Woman is a good example of this circumstance. María, the main character, cannot start recovering from the abuse of her first husband when she already has to reckon with a society that impoverished her, asks her daughter to die in a foreign city, and pushes her to get another abusive husband to sustain her kids. Events constantly conflate memories: there is no time to remember the repressed when another moment of “unbearable and intolerable” violence strikes the victim.

Even if the person cannot place the traumatic event in a linear narrative, the study of trauma, according to the abovementioned authors, requires a division between the past and present. The past is the moment of the event, and the present is the healing process: creating a safe space. María, like many other women, black, indigenous, or non-binary populations, does not have the possibility of a (safe) present. One can suggest that her memories are still being repressed and “acted out.” Yet, her performance is stuck between “a repeated suffering of the event,” and an impossibility of “leaving” the “site.”

For van der Kolk, the recovery of trauma “involves the restoration” of “the capacity for playfulness and creativity” (242). Can the “resistance due to repression,” in this case, the repression being the continual repetition of the traumatic event, also become creative? Does the constant repetition of the traumatic event reduce the impact on its victim? According to de la Cruz Cruz’s work, certainly not.