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The Aftermath of Psychical Trauma: Finding a Voice

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The Aftermath of Psychical Trauma: Finding a Voice THE AFTERMATH OF PSYCHICAL TRAUMA: FINDING A VOICE Exegesis by Eleanor Wills accompanying the novella PLUMBAGO Creative Writing Discipline of English School of Humanities The University of Adelaide Submitted 2/3/2017 i TABLE OF CONTENTS Title page ……………………………………………………………………………... i Table of contents ……………………………………………………………………… ii Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….. 1 Abstractions and Narrative …………………………………………………………. 3 Trauma …………………………………………………………………………… 3 Latency …………………………………………………………………………… 6 Deferred action or the second event ……………………………………………... 8 Deferred action—Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man ………………………….. 10 Deferred action and memory …………………………………………………….. 11 Deferred action and causality ……………………………………………………. 14 Deferred action and working through ……………………………………………. 18 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………… 25 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………. 27 ii INTRODUCTION The focus of my paper is on the window of opportunity given in the process of deferred action that allows a traumatised subject to move away from trauma’s otherwise inherent circularity to find a way forward. My enquiry does not ignore the very real situation where trauma impacts so overwhelmingly on a subject that it imprisons that subject in its unknowingness. The concept of deferred action translates from Freud’s German Nachträglichkeit. Deferred action is described as an action “occasioned by events and situations, or by an organic maturation, which allow the subject to gain access to a new level of meaning and to rework his earlier experience” (Lapanche and Pontalis 234). The idea of reworking or working through an earlier experience toward a new level of meaning is at the heart of my investigation into voice. Thus deferred action with its something new includes a revisiting of voice whose truth has stayed in the unconscious awaiting release. To reach this part of a traumatic journey I have used a trauma model that best suits my research question originating from the creative component. The model that I have chosen is from Peter Nicholl’s essay, “The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms and Toni Morrison”. His model of a traumatic journey consists of a first event or the site of trauma, latency which refers to a period of forgetfulness, followed by a second event or deferred action brought on by a trigger that takes the victim back to the traumatic event. These concepts are drawn from the language of psychoanalysis. For the concept deferred action and the issue of voice, I discuss Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man’s infantile neurosis and Caruth’s trauma model of unknowing and knowing in relation to the wound and the voice. 1 Each of the following is an example of works that can be read for the above psychoanalytic concepts. They are The Words To Say It by Marie Cardinal (Memoir), Beloved by Toni Morrison (novel), the five Patrick Melrose novels; Never Mind, Bad News, Mother’s Milk, At Last, Some Hope and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, also a novel. These works are reviewed as examples of working through that is guided by the wound and the voice. They give further expression to the concept of the trauma voice found in my creative work Plumbago. Freud’s model of working through, detailed in “THE CASE OF THE WOLF MAN from the History of an Infantile Neurosis”, is still current. It involves the transference of the analysand’s traumatic impressions to the analyst who listens to what the patient is saying and who “hears in the analysand’s language the pressure toward meaning” (Brooks 56). Thus the analyst offers interpretations “which consist chiefly in showing how the meanings in question may be recognised in different contexts” (Lapanche and Pontalis 488). However in the Wolf Man’s case study, the analysand does not find a truth that he is looking for in the analyst’s voice. Thus the Wolf Man loses his story to the analyst who constructs a narrative that in turn is problematic to the patient. Lukacher writes “the difficulty of soliciting the patient’s …conviction outside the confines of recollection constitutes the most profound crisis of modern interpretation” (31). Although memory is unreliable and it is highly problematic to attach memory to a child of eighteen months, nevertheless the primal or childhood scene “has a truth of its own” (Lukacher 31). There is “a zone where ‘truth’ has become a differential notion that is found somewhere between pure construction and historicity” (Lukacher 31). Derrida identifies historicity as “a series of temporal differences without any central present” (210). Hence historicity applies to the workings of the unconscious. 2 The idea that truth has a connection with the unconscious brings me to Caruth’s notion of truth finding a home in the traumatic wound as an alternative to the model of working through suggested by Freud. The traumatic wound originates in an impression that stays with the subject until it finds its release in the conscious mind. Deferred action carries the voice of the wound whether that voice may lead “...to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound, or whether the voice be a part of the subject’s self” ( Caruth 8). My creative writing project Plumbago, along with the narratives I have included, all identify with the model of a traumatic journey that refers to the psychoanalytic concepts of first event, second event, latency, deferred action and working through. Although Cardinal works through a part of her trauma with her analyst, she finds a pathway to her own healing by speaking her story to deliver a coherent and convincing narrative. Her story and the characters in The Patrick Melrose Stories, The Yellow Birds and Beloved work through their traumas by listening to the voice of the wound. The unwished for repetitions that characterise deferred action in the form of panic attacks, dreams, smell, noises and breakdown speak to us in a literary language of imagery and voice. The voice may represent the other within the self “that retains the memory of the ‘unwitting’ traumatic events of one’s past” (Caruth 8). It may also be a voice from outside that penetrates the trauma subject’s being and speaks to her. In either event it is up to the subject. She must be in a position to listen to the voice and to work through its truth to pave the way to healing. This is the model of working through that I find is the more helpful of the two. 3 ABSTRACTIONS AND NARRATIVE Trauma Laplanche and Pontalis note that while trauma is a term that traditionally referred to an injury in medicine and surgery, its adoption by psychoanalysis “carries the idea of a violent shock, the idea of a wound and the idea of consequences affecting the whole organisation” (466), over onto the psychical level. The traumatic journey as outlined by Nicholls comprises at least two events, the first event where an incident occurs that is not understood by the subject becomes the site of trauma. Benjamin disputes the term first event as the site of the original trauma “cannot be known as such, because it cannot be said to exist as such” (24). Trauma registers with the unconscious that is governed by a temporality “without a central present” (Derrida 51). An event without a present reveals itself as a repetition of “a fragment from another time when the subject was different” (Nicholls 55). However, while I agree with Benjamin in the sense that the original trauma is characterised by an unknowingness, making the term ‘event’ debatable, when the trauma returns many subjects are able to acknowledge its source. Patrick Melrose from The Patrick Melrose Stories knows that being raped by his father is the source of his trauma. Seth from Beloved understands that murdering Beloved to keep her from slavery is her burden. Hence I will continue to use Nicholls’ first event to refer to the original trauma. The first event is followed by a period of latency until a trigger brings the event into renewed focus. This is the second event or deferred action that “release(s) its traumatic force” (Nicholls 54). The idea of a wound, a traumatic force and its consequences that penetrate every corner of the subject’s existence describes the return of psychical trauma regardless of 4 whether that trauma originated in infancy, as a result of an accident, or from the brutality of war. However, we cannot talk about the second event without canvasing the first event or the origin of the traumatic journey. The first event brings about a type of memory that Krell describes as leaving an impression (3). This impression stays with us without being fully understood therefore, the first event is characterised by its unknowingness. Caruth writes of the memory of an impression as an event “that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again” (4). An example of an impression such as the one that Caruth refers to is found in Never Mind which is the first book in a series of five known collectively as The Patrick Melrose Stories. A five year old Patrick Melrose is pinned to his bed by his father: “What are you doing” he asked, but his father did not answer and Patrick was too scared to repeat the question. His father’s hand was pushing down on him and, his face squashed into the folds of the bedspread, he could hardly breathe. He stared fixedly up at the curtain pole and the top of the open windows. He could not understand what form the punishment was taking, but he knew that his father must be very angry with him to be hurting him so much… (St Aubyn 101). Patrick is too young to understand what his father is doing to him.
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