3. Trauma Theory: the last 100
years.
Trauma has attracted the
attention of many disciplines.
The reason is easy to
understand for those of us
today, who have the historical
knowledge of violence of the
twentieth century and the
experience of the ominous
start of twenty-first century.
4. A Century of
Traumas
The new millennium awakened to bloodshed
of an unprecedented scale on 9/11; two
subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
and the enormous loss of life and property
in Libya and Syria threw the world into
turmoil.
Shoshana Felman, Emory University
Professor specializing in 19th and 20th
literature and psychoanalysis, trauma and
testimony, literature and philosophy, law
and literature, calls the legacy of violence
we inherited from the twentieth century “a
century of traumas.”
This condition of the world has posed new
existential and epistemological questions
to human civilization, questions that
trauma theory is trying to make sense of
and answer
Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth
Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
5. Freudian Beginnings
Freudian Dreams
Freud referred to dreams as“the
royal road to a knowledge of the
unconscious activities of the
mind.” Dreaming, which,
according to Freud’s first
theories, happened distortedly or
symbolically, gives an outlet to
the dark desires repressed in the
unconscious or Id, so that sleep
is not disturbed by primitive
sexual and aggressive impulses
(Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams).
6. Traumatic dreams vs. Freudian dreams
The World War I veterans
plagued with PTSD puzzled
Freud because the literal
images they encountered in
dreams could not be explained
in terms of the dream theory he
devised earlier in The
Interpretation of Dreams.
.
7. The term trauma theory and
PTSD:
What Freud once called
“traumatic neurosis,” the
American Psychiatric
Association in 1980 officially
acknowledged and termed as
“Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder” (PTSD), a concept
significant to trauma theory.
The term “trauma theory” first
appears in Cathy Caruth’s
Unclaimed Experience (1996).
The theory stems from her
interpretation and elaboration
of Freud’s reflections on
traumatic experiences in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
and Moses and Monotheism.
8. Cathy Caruth defines PTSD as “a
response, sometimes delayed, to an
overwhelming event or events, which
takes the form of repeated, intrusive
hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or
behaviors stemming from the event [. .
.] [T]he event is not assimilated or
experienced fully at the time, but only
belatedly [. . .] To be traumatized is
precisely to be possessed by an
image or event.” (Caruth 3-5)
Cathy Caruth is a Cornell Professor of
English and German Romanticism.
She specializes in trauma theory;
psychoanalytic theory. Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative and
History; Empirical Truths and Critical
Fictions: Locke Wordsworth, Kant,
Freud.
From Cathy Caruth (ed.) (1995) 'Trauma
And Experience: Introduction’, Trauma:
Explorations in Memory.” Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
9. Why is literature so important in trauma theory?
Truth for anyone is a very complex
thing. For a writer, what you leave out
says as much as those things you
include. What lies beyond the margin
of the text? ...When we tell a story we
exercise control, but in such a way as
to leave a gap, an opening. It is a
version, but never the final one. And
perhaps we hope that the silences will
be heard by someone else, and the
story can continue, can be retold.
When we write we offer the silence as
much as the story. Words are the part
of silence that can be spoken. …Do
you remember the story of Philomel
who is raped and then has her tongue
ripped out by the rapist so that she
can never tell? I believe in fiction and
the power of stories because that way
we speak in tongues.
Jeanette Winterson,
Why Be Happy When You Could Be
Normal?
Trauma theorists deem
literature important because
of its ability to accommodate
both the comprehensible and
the incomprehensible.
Literary language
simultaneously defies as well
as claims understanding,
and all the pioneer trauma
theorists—beginning with
Freud and including Cathy
Caruth and Shoshana
Felman—turned to literature
for theoretical support.
10. Literature accommodates the known and the
unknown:
`Kurtz got the tribe to follow him,
did he?' I suggested. He
fidgeted a little. `They adored
him,' he said. The tone of these
words was so extraordinary that
I looked at him searchingly. It
was curious to see his mingled
eagerness and reluctance to
speak of Kurtz.
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Literature can contain
knowing and not knowing,
the known and unknown, the
knowable and unknowable
all at once in language, a
medium that itself oscillates
between the expressible and
inexpressible, the possible
and impossible.
Psychoanalysis, in its
extension to trauma theory,
makes use of this strange
nature of literature and its
medium.
11. 1. The Fight-or-Flight
2. Learned Helplessness
3. Loss of “Volume Control”
4. Thinking Under Stress—Action Not Thought
5. Remembering Under Stress
6. Emotions and Trauma—Dissociation
7. Endorphins and Stress—Addiction to Trauma
8. Trauma Reenactment
9. Trauma and the Body
10. Victim to Victimizer
Effects of Trauma
12. Homework
• Post #19 Choose one
– Discuss trauma as it applies to any one character in Rita
Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Use textual
support to make a case that the traumatic incident has long
term ramifications.
– Using a psychoanalytic lens, do a character profile of any one
character in Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.
