Downloaded from Brill.Com09/24/2021 05:28:38AM Via Free Access

Chapter 9 Reading Myself and Worlds: Coping Strategies in the Face of Cumulative Trauma Danielle Schaub 1 Introduction When starting in the years during which the self takes shape, childhood trauma leaves its scars on the sites of formation in the child’s developmental trajec- tory. In my case, the continuous geographical and linguistic disruptions caused by my father’s peripatetic working life foregrounded language as a site of traumatisation and insecurity in early years. Such insecurity only signals one trauma this body experienced repeatedly. The various traumatic experiences that inform me include cumulative trauma resulting from parental symbiosis underplaying a child’s existence; unprepared-for displacement and translation of identity; abandonment in a convent at the age of three; untimely death of a parent believed healthy without post-factum psychological or emotional sup- port; death of an underage sibling. I thought I had managed to bounce back after the debilitating experiences, proving capable of resilience. To some ex- tent I had; otherwise I would not have functioned, but since the experiences haunted me with a nagging, unsettling feeling for years, I found myself pon- dering over my reactions, behaviours, responses to specific stressful situations. With time and much ink, as Boris Cyrulnik notes, I have come to terms with the past and perceive what once felt life threatening as less devastating.1 With creative pieces involving the textual and the visual in combination or on their own, the chapter illustrates and theorises the process undertaken to cope with traumas as well as the understanding of patterns adopted to disconnect from the traumatic sources. Biblio-, photo- and scriptotherapy have no doubt played an extremely im- portant role in my working through. Bibliotherapy, ‘a therapeutic approach using texts as a basis for discussion of emotional and/or social problems,’ con- sists in ‘the interaction with fictional and/or poetic texts reflecting emotions, situations and relational issues of patients’; the bibliotherapeutic interaction ‘engages the latter’s emotions in the safe distance of other bodies, other places, 1 Boris Cyrulnik, Un merveilleux malheur (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999), 7–23. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:�0.��63/978900438593�_0�0 Danielle Schaub - 9789004385931 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:28:38AM via free access <UN> Reading Myself and Worlds 159 other times and frees them, allowing productive unconscious work on the self at a remove.’2 Different from its homonym used for medical conditions, pho- totherapy here involves addressing photographs that stir emotions, affording insights into suppressed past experiences. Scriptotherapy, on the other hand, refers to writing enabling healing. I use all three with patients and in my own work with or without a therapist. As a photographer, while interacting with the negatives in the dark room and recently with digital photographs, I engage in a dialogue with the unconscious motives for capturing a person, scene, or land- scape, as well as with the emotional impact of the finished product. Likewise when reading or writing poetry, fiction and non-fiction, I also open a dialogue with the material. While exemplifying and explaining the process followed to overcome the detrimental effects of traumas, this chapter sometimes repeats itself, illustrat- ing how trauma returns to haunt its victim and how its multiple ramifications reach out in multiple directions, thus presenting the same facet of an impact in different areas. In this respect Rafael E. López-Corvo has helped me understand the haunting linguistic anxieties and fear of abandonment informing me by differentiating ‘pre-conceptual traumas’ and ‘conceptual traumas’; oc- curring in early childhood before the emergence of a mind ‘containing and endowing them with meaning,’ pre-conceptual traumas ‘become an eternal “now” … continuously projected everywhere,’ ‘thereby determining not only all forms of psychopathology, but also the idiosyncrasy of every individual.’3 I now understand that circumstantial distress went back to pre-conceptual traumas that had scribbled layers of anxiety over loss and abandonment, each spread- ing like ink over wet paper. Amongst the behavioural and mental reactions fed by traumatic overflow, I recognise fear of not belonging, over-achievement for attention, perfectionism for approval, need to programme life, multi-tasking to face all situations, creation of stress to re-experience the original stressor, overarching self-criticism, existing at the edge, never fully controlling situations, never fully informed, never fully knowledgeable. The remnant of the har- rowing curse, these whirling mental and behavioural responses swell, leaving nothing untouched, explaining their visit in all fields of experience. However, on-going work has enhanced the resilience that at first kept this body function- ing sometimes at speeds defying human understanding. Today, though stress and excess of activities still inform me, I can avoid plunging in the doing mode and remain in the being mode for extensive periods. 2 Danielle Schaub, ‘Michel Deville’s La Lectrice: Honouring or Deriding Freud’s Theories Through Bibliotherapy?’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 89 (2008): 1238. 3 Rafael E. López-Corvo, Traumatised and Non-Traumatised States of the Personality: A Clinical Understanding Using Bion’s Approach (London: Karnac, 2014). Danielle Schaub - 9789004385931 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:28:38AM via free access <UN> 160 Schaub 2 Language, a Matter of Life and Death Raised all over the world because of my father’s geological postings, I grew up with many languages, an asset in the long run no doubt, but certainly a source of insecurity at the time. In order to secure acceptance among the locals wher- ever we lived, I viewed language as a threat to existence. Jean-Bertrand Pontalis discusses the omnipotence of language and the ‘impossibility of satisfying its demands,’ relating it to the loss of the maternal.4 In my case, language captured a double loss: loss of the maternal and exclusion from parental symbiosis. Each time a new language translated the self, it involved another loss, probably so unbearable as to feel life threatening. For those raised in only one place, such perception may sound disproportionate, but for the child forever feeling like an outsider, how best to fit in if not by mimicking the locals, including their linguistic peculiarities? Julia Kristeva captures the distress of the exiled ‘living with resonances and reasoning … cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet slumber of childhood’; she further comments on the exiled as ‘bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or like a handicapped child – cherished and useless – that language of the past that withers without ever leaving.’5 Such reality exists in me but magnified by the number of languages, further complicated by the choice to distance myself from the mother tongue in which I suffered abandonment by a father dying too early and a mother needing mothering. The further negation of the mother tongue through the choice of another to raise my children incurred more losses. Given the reality and unending quality of mourning Pontalis ascribes to language, my consider- ing language a matter of life and death becomes understandable.6 Luckily, I must have had enough secure attachment not to negate language and not to develop what Dana Amir terms ‘concrete language’ and ‘pseudo language,’ ‘the former rendering psychic discourse … impossible,’ the latter rendering ‘psychic discourse … barren and empty, high brow, and false.’7 Interestingly enough, in the country I chose to raise my children, I have not managed to reach a linguistic level meeting my expectations. In part this inad- equacy stems from decisions made at the time of emigrating. When we moved 4 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis ‘Mélancolie du langage,’ Perdre de vue (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 252 (translation mine). 5 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 15. For a potent description of the rupture in linguistic knowledge and apprehen- sion born of exile, see Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A life in a New Language (New York and London: Penguin, 1989). 6 Pontalis, Perdre de vue, 252. 7 Dana Amir, Cleft Tongue: The Structures of Psychic Language (London: Karnac, 2014), 4. Danielle Schaub - 9789004385931 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 05:28:38AM via free access <UN> Reading Myself and Worlds 161 to Israel with our young children, my partner and I did not use the rights we could have benefitted from to adjust faster, such as free linguistic tuition. We did not even realise that we forwent these, so eagerly did we jump into our new lives. Rather than learning the language in an immersion centre as most im- migrants, we proceeded with our new professional occupations that required no Hebrew. As part of an English Department, I only needed to master English. But each time a document in Hebrew required my attention, I felt as helpless as my younger self must have. Later when I decided to train as a bibliotherapist at the university, the nightmare started all over again. There I studied a new field whose Hebrew jargon I did not master. Most papers I could write in Eng- lish, but at times I had to write in Hebrew, which redoubled the stress exerted. My youngest daughter, who trained as a psychologist at the time, would type and polish what I dictated to her. When I had to deal with textual analysis of peers’ reports from therapy sessions, in order to relate their content and form to psychoanalytical theories, I had to translate the reports, an unwelcome ad- dition to an otherwise packed load. Confronted with a text in Hebrew I could not retain its information nor its phrasing long enough to comment on; I saw nothing worth highlighting. I had to translate the reports – sometimes with the invaluable help of my youngest daughter – if I wanted to engage in the exercise properly and learn from the experience.

Load more