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

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

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.

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. Nevertheless, the incident makes a lasting impression. This event stays in his unconscious until something triggers its revival where it enters the consciousness without warning.

The incomprehensibility of the first event is given voice by Murph, a character in

The Yellow Birds. Murph and some of his fellow soldiers are asked by a reporter during the

American involvement in the Iraq War to “tell me the essence, guys, I want to know the

5 kind of rush you get” (Powers 93). The ‘rush’ that the reporter is referring to is that of being at the front line in combat. Murph responds:

It’s like a car accident. You know? That instant between knowing that it’s

gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car. Feels pretty helpless

actually, like you’ve been riding along same as always, then it’s staring you

in the face and you don’t have the power to do shit about it. And know it.

Death or whatever, it’s either coming or not (Powers 93).

The not knowing that Patrick Melrose and Murph express in their respective narratives are the hallmarks of the traumatic journey. Both narratives are written to satisfy narrative convention. There is a beginning and an end, scenes are ordered and dialogue expresses the thoughts and actions of a character within context. Nevertheless, an underlying chaos persists. A sense of helplessness casts its shadow over the apparent orderliness of traumatic narrative and in so doing we are reminded of the two temporalities at play.

Latency

Continuing on from the incomprehensibility of the first event, the traumatic journey enters a second phase referred to as latency. This concept was originally identified as a period “which extends from the dissolution of infantile sexuality (at the age of five or six) to the onset of puberty, constituting a pause in the evolution of sexuality” (Lapanche and

Pontalis 234). Thus the latency period was understood in the first instance in purely biological terms. Later Freud acknowledged the extension of the concept to include that which followed “accidents involving a risk to life” and “the great number of illnesses” arising from men fighting in a war” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 6). In this context, latency refers to a period in the traumatic journey where the subject seems to have

6 emerged unharmed from the original confusing experience. Freud notes in his case study of the Wolf Man, that his patient “had lived an approximately normal life during the ten years of his boyhood that preceded the date of his illness…..” (154). Freud’s use of the word ‘illness’ takes us away from the original account of a biological latency period to assign in the Wolf Man’s case study an inherent latency in trauma- induced neurosis.

In The Yellow Birds Bartel survived the horrors of fighting on the war front in Iraq by developing a fatalistic mindset. Those soldiers that died were regarded “as those whose names had been on the list long before the dead had come to Iraq” (12). Bartel’s thought processes protect him from the destructive forces of fear, powerlessness and shock for the duration of his active service in Iraq. In Plumbago, Rebekah ‘forgets’ her family and her earlier life as soon as she moves out of her childhood home. Her forgetting is not a conscious action; it just happens and her trauma-induced latency covers a span of twenty years. Friends and indeed Rebekah’s children who did not know of her earlier life were none the wiser.

Caruth describes latency as inherent in the traumatic journey. She refers to Freud’s observation of an accident scene where a victim walks away ‘apparently unharmed’ and

Freud’s own traumatic experience of leaving his home in Vienna because of Nazi persecution (16-20). Both these scenarios involve a departure from a scene of helplessness.

It is a departure that is apparently under our control where we walk away seemingly unharmed or move our life to another place. However latency shows that this idea of a departure is misleading. The notion of departure that is linked with latency is not something that is entirely within the subject’s control. Departure in the sense of latency takes the victim to a different time and place and in so doing generates an impression that the original site of trauma has been left behind. However this impression is destroyed when the trauma returns.

7 In Plumbago, Rebekah believes that she is at last free from the suffocating life that she left. Freud is free to continue with his work on psychoanalysis by fleeing Nazi persecution and settling in London. Bartel’s fatalistic mindset develops after he arrives in

Iraq. It represents his way of coping with a daily dose of atrocity in a war zone and it is also viewed as a departure from his way of thinking before he joined the USA army. Bartel later reflects from the safety of his home in Richmond, Virginia that he “was not surprised by the cruelty of [his] ambivalence [to death] then. …I needed to continue…” (Powers 11).

Latency is therefore a part of the unknowingness of trauma that stays within the unconscious mind until something triggers a return. This return is known as deferred action.

Deferred action or the second event

Nicholls describes deferred action as “a product of the excessive character of the first event which requires a second event to release its traumatic force” (54). The trigger which releases the traumatic force occurs without warning, bringing “a fragment [of a past trauma] from another time when the subject was different” (55).

It is this intrusion of a temporality that is not under our control that causes such an upheaval. Nicholls describes this temporality as a historicity, “an ancientness without history” (55). Unlike the metaphysical temporality of consciousness that works with a past, present and future, the intrusive temporality is “a series of temporal differences without any central present” (Derrida 210).

The trigger for Marie Cardinal’s first anxiety attack comes during a Louis

Armstrong concert where the sounds from his trumpet cause her accelerating heart beat to

“[shake] the bars of my rib cage” as she leaves the concert hall “svelte in appearance but

8 torn apart inside” (Cardinal 40). Cardinal calls her possessive illness ‘the Thing’ which during one repetition has enough traumatic force to render her

Curled up like a ball, heels against buttocks, arms holding the knees, strong,

tight against the chest, nails dug so deep into the palms of her hands they

eventually pierced the skin, her head rocking back and forth or side to side,

feeling so heavy, the blood and sweat was pouring out of her. The Thing,

which on the inside was made of a monstrous crawling of images, sounds,

and odours, projected in every way by a devastating pulse making all

reasoning incoherent, all explanation absurd, all efforts to order tentative

and useless, was revealed on the outside by a violently shaking and

nauseating sweat (Cardinal 10).

‘The Thing’ that makes “all reasoning incoherent, all explanation absurd, all efforts to order tentative and useless” (Cardinal 10), is “a forgotten history that has the power to shake the social and metaphysical forms against which it breaks” (Nicholls 52). In

Morrison’s Beloved, the arrival of the stranger at No. 124 triggers the memory of a traumatic day in a barn for both Seth and Paul D. When Paul D reveals that Halle was also watching events unfold that day Seth’s brain becomes “rebellious”. Seth “was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (Morrison 83).

At a conscious level, Seth should be planning for the next day. However her

“rebellious” brain is suddenly not interested in the next day, rather her mind is occupied by something from her past. She wants to hear from Paul D’s “re-memories” (Morrison 83), what he knew of Halle’s whereabouts on that day in the barn. Not only is Seth “hungry for more” but her hunger also suggests an urgency. Seth “knew that Paul D was adding

9 something to her life—something she wanted to count on but was scared to. Now he had added more: new pictures and old re-memories that broke her heart” (Morrison 112).

Seth’s consciousness is invaded by an intrusive temporality that “shares with the temporality of the subject the qualities of self-division and disunity, but it must not be construed in terms of the empirical time of consciousness” (Nicholls 55). This intrusive temporality is guided by repetition or “the repeated thrust of the subject’s own trauma as it shapes [her] life” (Caruth 7). Both Cardinal’s ‘thing’ and Seth’s ‘something’ refer to an unknown but powerful force whose “violent possession” of consciousness’s “thematics of time and memory” leaves the subject “torn apart inside” (Nicholls 52).

Deferred action—Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man

The Wolf Man was born in 1886 and presented to Freud in 1910 (Memoirs of the

Wolf Man 83). The patient’s mental health had deteriorated and he was suffering bouts of severe depression. Part of Freud’s treatment of the Wolf Man was to take him back to his childhood on the premise that “every neurosis in an adult is built upon a neurosis which has occurred in his childhood…” (Freud 240).

Through the course of analysis, the Wolf Man revives an impression of witnessing his parents having sexual intercourse. The patient is only eighteen months at the time which makes him too young to understand and be moved by what he saw (Freud 186).

Nevertheless it is an impression that gathered understanding as the Wolf Man matured. At twenty four years, the patient is “able to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him” (Freud 189). Freud writes that the words used by the Wolf Man to articulate the “impressions and impulses of his fourth year” are words which “he would never have been able to find at the time … this is simply another instance of deferred action” (189).

10 Language development is of course an important aspect to deferred action. After twenty one years of living inside a religious cult, Rebekah in Plumbago finds words that are new to her such as cult, fundamentalism, radicalisation, mind control, closed cults and many more terms for everyday use. The words specific to the isolated world that she grew up in were essential to her understanding of the subsequent trauma that she experienced.

Place and time to which the subject is normally exposed include factors of continual social, environmental, biological and political change. Therefore to remember a past event in terms of deferred action is to “weave around a rememorated element an entire network of meaningful relations that integrate it into the subject’s explicit apprehension of himself” (Laplanche & Leclaire 128).

Deferred action and memory

Nicholls writes: “To remember is thus not simply to restore a forgotten link or moment of experience, nor is it unproblematically to ‘repossess’ or re-enact what has been lost” (53). Morrison’s Beloved provides an example of the problem of seeking to repossess what has been lost. When Seth realises that her ghostly visitor is her murdered daughter

Beloved, she claims the return as proof of a mother’s love. Seth declares “She’s mine… she come back to me of her own free will” (Morrison 236). Seth’s declaration of her reunification with her daughter is problematic on many levels. Beloved was murdered by

Seth to prevent her from being taken into slavery. What Seth has admitted into her house is her murdered daughter’s ghost. Not only does Seth attempt to bring Beloved back to life, the ghostly visitor is now a grown woman. Very soon Seth is engrossed in her fantasy world. She defends her isolation “from a world out there” (Morrison 215), by telling herself that “Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room.

This here’s all there is and all there needs to be” (Morrison 215).

11 Seth is locked into a past that can only serve to imprison her. In her room Seth sets about to right the past by indulging Beloved’s ghost her every whim in an effort to reaffirm a mother’s love. Seth’s quest to bring Beloved back into her life results in her failing to notice the changing power dynamic between her and her ghost daughter. Denver is witness to Beloved “dressed in Seth’s dresses” imitating her mother’s way of speaking, of talking, walking and copying how Seth “moved her hands, sighed through her nose, held her head” (Morrison 283). Beloved consumes so much of Seth’s identity “until it was quite difficult for Denver to tell who was who” (Morrison 283). Isolated from her community and with her eyes focussed solely on a seemingly endless task of proving her mother love to her daughter ghost, Seth locks herself into her fantasy world. Nicholls describes this engagement with the past as “a thoroughly metaphysical ‘presencing’ of what is absent” (53).

Hence Seth’s connection with her past prevents her from moving forward. While deferred action does involve a re-visiting of things past, “the original event is no longer the same as itself” (Benjamin 30). The constant movement of time and space must be factored into memory for the subject to break the circularity that Seth is locked into. While the movement of time and space carries a fragment of a past event, “the effect of the present on the past is to cause a repetition of the event within which something new is taking place” (Benjamin 30).

Deferred action does reference the past but it is a past that reappears as repetitions of a fragmentary event that requires a construction (Nicholls 55). The construction involves an assessment of the images, smells, sounds, place and time from the subject’s present which in turn comes with a bundle of shaping forces that continuously impact. This second (and subsequent) event(s) involves a restructuring of the first event which is very different from just recovering a lost memory (Nicholls 54).

12 A restructuring of the first event includes the memory of a fragment of the past event and the subject’s “complex temporality” or the now of the subject that is very different from what was (Nicholls 54). Deferred action involves a “real working over” or

“a work of recollection” that “involves a complex set of psychological operations”

(Laplanche & Pontalis 114). Freud observes his patients going through each impression on a daily basis to “weep over it and console herself—at her leisure, one might say”

(Lapanche and Pontalis 114).

Initially Seth isolates herself from the world outside of her room to shower

Beloved’s ghost with a mother’s love. Patrick (The Patrick Melrose Stories) is addicted to alcohol and illegal drugs in an attempt to alleviate the pain inflicted by his father. Bartel

(The Yellow Birds) drifts through each day in isolation in his derelict building, waiting for the US army to catch up with him to lay blame over the letter Bartel had written to

Murph’s mother concerning her son’s death. Marie Cardinal in The Words to Say It is left cowering in her bathroom while The Thing rages uncontrollably via panic attacks, phobia and breakdown. Rebekah in Plumbago is reduced to a jabbering mess as she slumps beside her dishwasher pummelled by images racing through her consciousness.

Nevertheless each of the above characters eventually finds a space to address the pain that deferred action foists upon them. Two examples of release that I draw upon come from Beloved and The Yellow Birds. When the women led by Ella confront 124, Seth runs at Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick. The pick is wrestled from her by Denver and a few of the other women offer their support. In the melee Beloved is left alone on the front porch from which she subsequently flees (Morrison 312-14).

Bartel finds his space in his Fort Knox prison cell where he uses his cell walls to mark with chalk his memories of the war. His initial thought was “to piece the war into a

13 pattern” (Powers 216). However his memories could not be assembled into a pattern as the marks on the wall were made at whatever moment he remembered them and were fixed in their space. Had Bartel been confined for another year or more, there would have been no marks at all just a patina of white “all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which [he] was imprisoned” (Powers 218). The guards gave a more meaningful interpretation of Bartel’s cell marks as representing the days left in prison before his release. Hence Bartel discovers that memories in themselves do not posit a purposeful structure. Something new is required. The guards’ voices as they interpret the marks as Bartel’s counting the days until his release carry a truth that release brings. Just as Seth is initially confined to memories of the past, Bartel also locks himself into a past that is meaningless in its unconstructed form.

Deferred action and causality

Deferred action challenges the traditional notion of causality which follows a teleological or purposive structure (Nicholls 54). Lukacher writes “deferred action demands that one recognize that while the earlier event is still to some extent the cause of the later event, the earlier event is nonetheless also the effect of the later event” (35). In

Plumbago Rebekah visits her mother’s house where she unwittingly steps into an atmosphere of fear and hostility that plunges her back into an earlier life which she thought she had left. The visit triggers deferred action where an earlier event is thrust into

Rebekah’s consciousness. Its forceful re-entry into her conscious sphere pushes normalcy aside to fill the space with frightening images of both her mother and sister. They are images made all the more stark by the passage of two decades in which Rebekah lost contact with her family.

14 The visit to her old home triggers a return to the life that Rebekah once led and from which she turned away to enjoy a life of her choosing. Here we have the visit causing a return of the earlier event while the earlier event is also the effect of the second event.

Causality in terms of deferred action is causality “that repeatedly turns back upon itself”

(Lukacher 35).

Another impact of a causality “that repeatedly turns back upon itself” presents the second event as the cause of the first event (Nicholls 54). For this reason I have opened

Plumbago with Rebekah’s violent breakdown only hours after her home visit. It is from this visit that she experiences an awakening of her past. Rebekah is back in her comfortable home filling her dishwasher with spent crockery and cutlery from her family’s evening meal when she is rendered speechless and barely able to function. She knows now that this violent reaction to the fear and hostility that met her at her mother’s house door was not fully understood at the time of its origin. It is only through this second event that the excessive character of the first event has an opportunity to release its traumatic force

(Nicholls 54).

A causality that “repeatedly turns back on itself” (Lukacher 35) has implications for the notion of a primal scene. In the Wolf Man case study Freud takes a dream that his patient re- remembered and places it at the centre of his patient’s infantile neurosis. This dream took place on Christmas Eve when the Wolf Man was about four years of age. The

Wolf Man dreamt that his bedroom window flung open to reveal wolves instead of

Christmas presents sitting on a yard tree (Freud 186). He awoke anxious from this dream, fragments of which stayed with him. At twenty four years of age the Wolf Man gave Freud a detailed description of this dream. Freud in return constructed a link between the dream and the Wolf Man’s earlier impressions of witnessing his parents having sex in a bid to explain his patient’s “lasting memory” of the dream (Lukacher 34).

15 Freud’s construction of impressions prior to the Wolf Man’s dream takes the explanatory mechanism of the dream back to his patient’s impression of his parents having sexual intercourse. Lukacher stresses that “at no point in the argument, however, does

Freud posit …a purposive structure” (35). The randomness with which deferred action is triggered, through dreams, panic attacks, stories, sounds and smells creates a proliferation of images from which only a “framework of narrative possibilities” can be constructed

(Lukacher 37).

Once Freud has constructed a primal scene for the Wolf Man, he wonders if

“perhaps what the child observed was not copulation between his parents but copulation between animals, which he then displaced on to his parents, as though he had inferred that his parents did things in the same way” (Freud 201).

Hence a second narrative is constructed where the child who is ill in bed woke from a sleep to find his parents “dressed in white… but—the scene was innocent. The rest had been added by the inquisitive child’s subsequent wish, based on his experience with the dogs, to witness his parents too in their love-making” (Freud 202). The primal scene, which was to take the patient to the bedrock of his neurosis so that healing could begin,

“becomes a layered text that offers differing versions of the same story” (Brooks 276).

In this climate of differing versions of the same story, a shared understanding between the analyst and the analysand is thwarted by the analyst who “inevitably not only

‘stages the question’ but also writes the patient’s script as well”(Lukacher 147). The Wolf

Man is left out of his story. He tells journalist Karin Obholzer that the wolf dream did not link to Freud’s constructed primal scene:

When he [Freud] interprets the white wolves as nightshirts or something like

that, for example, linen sheets of clothes, that’s somehow far-fetched, I

16 think. That scene in the dream where the windows open and so on and the

wolves are sitting there, and his interpretation, I don’t know, those things

are miles apart. It’s terribly far-fetched (Obholzer 35).

For the Wolf Man, the seduction by his sister is the scene “that lay at the origin of his neurosis” (Lukacher 137). This is a re-remembered fragment that the Wolf Man argues had a lasting impact on his intimate relations with women. Sixty years later the Wolf Man tells Obholzer “Well, this sister complex is really the thing that ruined my entire life. For those women who resemble my sister, I mean as regards social position or education, well, that was prohibition again, that was incest again” (37).

Of this event, Freud assures his readers that the Wolf Man’s “seduction by his sister was certainly not a fantasy” (Freud 165). His patient’s memory of this event was backed by a cousin who remembered “what a forward and sensual little thing she had been” (Freud 165). Subsequently the Wolf Man chose women who were his social and intellectual inferior. (Freud 167).

By the end of “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”, Freud has constructed several primal scenes, none of which bring his patient any closer to accepting his analyst’s version of a primal scene as the cause of his neurosis. Although the Wolf Man is anxious to find a primal scene from which healing can take place, he concludes that the seduction scene “has a far greater explanatory power than Freud’s construction scene” (Lukacher

137).

While both analyst and analysand differ over which construct has the greater explanatory power Lukacher suggests that this tussle has to do with the matter of subjectivity. The Wolf Man wants to retain the authority of his subjectivity while Freud

17 wants to construct a narrative that demonstrates “through its hermeneutic power, the authority of his leadership” (140).

The struggle between competing subjectivities reduces analysis to “its own treadmill… where the patient’s neurosis is simply exchanged for a transference neurosis”

(Lukacher 143). Freud’s construction of the primal scene left the Wolf Man isolated. The patient’s story had been hijacked by another whose construction of events was regarded as

“far- fetched” (Obholzer 35). This outcome is grim news for trauma subjects wishing to find a pathway that might lead them towards healing. Can deferred action that repeatedly turns back on itself offer an opening that leads the subject away from its inherent circularity?

Deferred action and working through

The psychoanalytical concept of working through is traditionally associated with a process conducted between the analysand and the analyst. Working through is described as a process “by means of which analysis implants an interpretation and overcomes the resistances to which it has given rise” (Laplanche & Pontalis 488). However a reading of the Wolf Man’s case study reveals how problematic this process is. Freud’s use of the term

‘case study’ refers to a non-fictional genre which is misleading as the Wolf Man’s

“History of an Infantile Neurosis” is “radically allied to the fictional since its causes and connections depend on probabilistic constructions rather than authoritative facts” (Brooks

284).

The Wolf Man’s construction of his own narrative is therefore as valid as that of his analyst. While both the analyst and the analysand are driven by a desire to shape the confused material of a life into a meaningful structure so that healing can take place, this process is fraught with tension. The ideal relationship between analysand and analyst

18 according to Brooks is where “the insistent past must be allowed to write its design at the same time as one attempts to unravel it” (282).

I want to move away from the analyst and analysand scenario to consider Caruth’s proposal of the wound and the voice as a theoretical platform on which to base the concept of working through. Deferred action brings the voice of the wound into consciousness. Its delayed appearance “cries out” and “addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 4). That voice maybe outside of us or it

“represents the other within the self that retains the memory of the ‘unwitting’ traumatic events of one’s past” (Caruth 8). It is a voice that haunts us repetitively and in its repetition demands a listening ear to its truth.

Each of the narratives that I have selected for this project refers to the voice(s) of the traumatic wound. After Beloved is driven from 124 by Ella and the women of Seth’s community, Paul D returns. Paul D represents a voice outside of Seth who shares her traumatic past of slavery. “Seth,” he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (Morrison 322).

Another example of the speaking wound is found with the impact that Louis

Armstrong’s trumpet playing has on Marie Cardinal. At the concert, the sounds from

Armstrong’s trumpet causes Marie’s accelerating heart beat to “[shake] the bars of my rib cage” as she fled the concert hall “gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling”(Cardinal 40).

Morrison observes in Playing in the Dark that this anxiety attack that led Cardinal to ideas of death and which sent her to therapy “goes unremarked—by her, by her analyst, and by the eminent doctor …who wrote both the Preface and the Afterword to Cardinal’s autobiography” (9). Initially Cardinal brings her concerns about her heavy menstrual

19 bleeding to therapy and once she has that sorted she gains confidence. Although she continues therapy, she now has more control over the story of her life. She describes her life in Algeria where she comes to regard her host country as her mother. The subsequent war saw her and her mother fleeing the country that Cardinal regarded as her home and it is the trauma preceding a departure that draws readers to construct a connection between

Armstrong’s haunting trumpet sounds and the genesis of “The Thing”.

News of the death of Patrick’s father in Some Hope is received at a time when an adult Patrick is living in a drug and alcohol induced haze in an attempt to block the pain of his childhood. Later when Patrick is clean he awakes from a dream feeling “worn out by his lifelong need to be in two places at once: in his body and out of his body, on the bed and on the curtain pole…” (St Aubyn 4).

The death of Patrick’s mother speaks to him in At Last of “a fleeting opportunity to bring something slightly new into the world instead” (St Aubyn175). Patrick is describing deferred action where each traumatic return is subject to a restructuring due to another layer separating the past from the present: “even something slightly new could be the layer underneath something slightly newer” (St. Aubyn 175).

This something “slightly newer” opens fresh horizons and an opportunity for the subject to focus on the tomorrows rather than the yesterdays. For Patrick to stay with the past, to not listen to the voice, would mean that “his body would keep him living under its misguided heroic strain, like a Japanese soldier who has never been told the news of surrender and continues to booby-trap his patch of jungle, and prepare for the honour of a self-inflicted death” (St Aubyn 176).

A voice penetrates the breakdown that overcomes Rebekah (Plumbago) very soon after her home visit. It quietly persists in telling her that the home she visited was once her

20 home. She had lived amongst the madness, fear and control of religious fundamentalism in her formative years and the impact had shaped her. At first she rebels against the idea that she carries a part of that shaping with her. After all, she never was religious, sexist, racist or fixed in attitude, nor did she set out to control others. Nevertheless there are aspects of her character such as a resistance to allowing people to get too close and a deep suspicion of others’ motives that she comes to accept as consequences of her early life.

Bartel from The Yellow Birds comes to recognise the futility of trying to make sense of his war experience. When he is questioned about an incident involving his friend

Murph’s body and the death of civilians and a letter he wrote to Murph’s mother, he realises that the underlying truth of the story that has him subject to army discipline has been “long skewed by the variety of a few boys’ memories” (Powers 183). Bartel closes his eyes while everything he could remember about the war “flashed kaleidoscopically so he could not pattern it”… “none of it made any sense” (Powers 182). A voice in the shape of a whip-poor-will bird outside of Bartel’s window opens his eyes to the incomprehensibility of what separated one moment from the next. What the voice also tells

Bartel is that he is different now. The war that had accelerated his change reflected utter confusion and is better left alone (Powers 182-3).

The bird at Bartel’s window causes him to open his eyes. This seeing represents

Bartel exiting the past. The idea of exiting the past is described by Caruth in her interpretation of the French woman exiting the cellar where she was confined during her madness (32). The event is played out in the film Hiroshima mon amour. Both Bartel and the French woman move away from the imprisonment by their respective pasts. The

French woman’s cellar which Caruth corresponds to the Platonic story of the cave (32), could be exchanged with Bartel’s derelict room. Just as latency is an integral part of the traumatic journey the moving away from one’s past in deferred action “comes to mean the

21 emergence into a full, truer knowledge that forgetting is indeed a necessary part of understanding” (Caruth 32). My understanding of “forgetting” in the sense that Caruth uses it, refers to a letting go rather than the earlier latency which allows the subject to gather more of life before deferred action blasts its way into consciousness.

Thus the traumatic wound with its unpredictable returns that hound the subject carries a voice of truth. The voice of otherness presents in many forms waiting for a listening ear. In the meantime the knowing voice of the wound persists in the face of “the ceaseless betrayal of bodily sight” (Caruth 33). Caruth is referring to the earlier argument between the French woman and her Japanese lover in Hiroshima mon amour over their respective ‘seeing’ of Hiroshima. The French woman knows the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as a day of liberation for France while her Japanese lover sees

Hiroshima through images of the horror on television screens, “mutilated bodies at the museum [and] in archival footage” (Caruth 28).

The disparity of “knowing” that exists between the French woman and her

Japanese lover re Hiroshima are linked to events in their respective lives. For the French woman, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima also coincides with the death of her German soldier lover. His death is an event that the French woman clings to and it is this event on the day of France’s liberation that represents her knowing Hiroshima. Once the French woman comes to terms with her lover’s death she can “see and know the past of others as well”(Caruth 33).

When the voice of the wound is heard, the way is cleared towards healing. Once

Beloved’s ghost is exorcised from 124 “they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep” (Morrison 324). With time passing the occupants of 124 couldn’t

“remember or repeat a single thing she [Beloved] said” (Morrison 324). Each had her own

22 thoughts on the memory of Beloved’s ghost but the idea of a collective memory didn’t form and as the wider community were no longer interested, “remembering seemed unwise” (Morrison 324).

Bartel’s eyes open to a future made possible by his acknowledgement of a truth when he realises “that the marks (on his cell walls) could not be assembled into any kind of pattern” (Powers 217). Previously he had hoped that the marks representing memories would work their way into a narrative so that he could make sense of the war (Powers

216). However the senselessness of war prevailed. Murph’s untimely death was also something that Bartel had to put to rest before he could move forward.

Murph’s] body finally [broke] apart near the mouth of the gulf, where the

shadows of the date palms fell in long, dark curtains on his bones, now

scattered, and swept them out to sea toward a line of waves that break

forever as he enters them (Powers 226).

Cardinal’s phobia with adolescent sexual changes as well as issues she has with her mother takes her back to her childhood in Algiers. There she works through impressions and memory fragments to construct a story that ends with a reconciliation of Cardinal’s relationship with her mother: “The door closes behind me. In front of me, the cul-de-sac, the city, the country and an appetite for life and for building as big as the earth itself ”

(Cardinal 295).

The voice that spoke to Rebekah (Plumbago) reminding her of a part of the self that required acknowledgement before she could move forward, spoke of a truth that came from the wound. Rebekah’s initial resistance to that truth presented a fragmented self in need of restructuring. That restructuring required a re-visiting of her past from her present.

The pale blue plumbago flowers that hung in bunches on long tendrils seemed to wave at

23 her as she passed on her way into her family’s local church hall. The blue of the flower brought the sky closer and spoke to her of a freedom from the wretched way of life that she was forced to endure. Rebekah’s walking away from the cult coincided with the disappearance of the plumbago shrub. She did not see it again until she managed to work through her trauma and then the plumbago flower reappeared. This time she noticed a deeper shade of blue. This deeper shade represents a reunification of the self:

It is late summer. The plumbago bushes are in flower and maybe it is a

combination of a recent downpour of rain and some humid March weather

that has coaxed the blue into a magnificent display. This year a deeper blue

cluster catches the eye. It sits comfortably amongst its paler cousins. Perhaps

the deeper blue was always there and it is only now that Rebekah is able to

see it.

24 CONCLUSION

My research question focusses on a model of a traumatic journey which covers the psychoanalytic concepts from Nicholls’ model of first event, latency, second event and working through. This model shows the unpredictability of the traumatic journey that

Caruth refers to as an unknowing where events associated with trauma lie outside of the subject’s control.

The first event where a situation or an event is experienced but not fully understood is held in the unconscious until its traumatic force is released at a later time. In the meantime the subject appears to have survived the event apparently unharmed. The trigger that releases the traumatic force of deferred action or the second event is again outside of the subject’s control. The trigger’s otherness may take the form of a sound, smell, place, shape or an object in its many forms. The trigger opens a space for the release of the traumatic force through panic attack, recurrent dreams and breakdown.

The turmoil that accompanies the release of a traumatic force finds a theoretical reflection as the impact of an intrusive temporality that is without a present. Hence the release of traumatic force is linked to the trope of a return. Deferred action is characterised by a series of returns or repetitions in which fragments of the first event continue to haunt the subject.

It is generally in the midst of the chaos that is brought about by a clash of temporalities that the subject seeks help in untangling this unwelcome intrusion. However psychoanalysis as a clinical practice delivers another set of issues as identified in Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man. Freud’s attempt to construct a primal scene from his patient’s narration of impressions, memory fragments, and dreams invariably leads to a construction

25 of the analyst’s narrative rather than one that reflects the joint work of the analyst and the analysand.

Caruth’s proposal of a voice embedded in trauma or a voice within the wound is compelling. The voice allows the subject to move forward at her own pace and offers guidance in unravelling the chaos to construct a meaningful narrative. In this way the subject is left to her own working through of her life story towards a healing. The wound and the voice find expression in each of the narratives that I have canvassed in this project.

While there is no sure way of alleviating traumatic suffering, the wound and the voice do offer a possibility for the subject to find a meaningful pathway towards healing.

Therefore the traumatic journey of unknowing does incorporate an aftermath where the chaos gives way to a less troubled journey when the voice of trauma is heard.

8,287 words

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