1. TRAUMA

2. the trauma boom psychological, medical, social, ethical issues
legal, political implications
19th century: railway accidents – insurance claims, litigation
the trickiness of trauma: its ‘truth’
trauma is its own proof; invisible injury; mental suffering quantified

3. responsibility - agency
Natural causes, accidents - human violence/cruelty
Perpetrator(s), punishment
Trauma is constructed in a network of attitudes, power relations, political systems

4. social-political context
#metoo; the Harvey Weinstein scandal in Hollywood
the difficulty of talking about trauma: role of environment (political, legal)
perpetrators, victims, bystanders

5. looking away or taking action
latency rate (domestic violence, rap, abuse)
desire to forget – desire to proclaim and testify

6. “War and victims are something the community wants to forget; a veil of oblivion is drawn over everything painful and unpleasant. We find the two sides face to face; on one side the victims who perhaps wish to forget but cannot, and on the other all those with strong, often unconscious motives who very intensely both wish to forget and succeed in doing so. . . The weakest one remains the losing party in this silent and unequal dialogue.” (Leo Eitinger)

7. the legitimacy of trauma
doubts concerning trauma claims
awareness: social context of support (cultures of repression and denial)

8. Judith Herman: Trauma and Recovery
three key (historical) types of trauma
hysteria
shell-shock
domestic violence and rape
(+ Holocaust survivors)
attempts to trivialise or disqualify trauma

9. (1) Hysteria Freud’s two theories of (female) hysteria
(1)trauma theory
(2)repression theory:
recantation (women invent their fantasies of abuse)

10. (2) Shell-shock
suspicions of malingering, laziness, cowardice (Lewis Yealland: electric shocks)
“remember, you must behave as the hero I expect you to be A man who has gone through so many battles should have better control of himself.”
W. H. R. Rivers: more humane approach
After Vietnam: changed cultural context
1980: PTSD

11. (3) Domestic violence
Women’s lives hidden in the private sphere (‘non-political’)
1971: first rape crisis centre (US)
combat syndrome – domestic violence: same symptoms

12. (4) Holocaust survivors
Civilian population – total annihilation of personal integrity
Holocaust denial
Relativisation

13. ISSUES I – reality or metaphor
trauma: a metaphor
Greek ‘wound’
first conversion: physical → mental
second conversion: individual → collective
change of political climate: open discussion of genocide, uprooting, slavery, colonial oppression
personal vs historical trauma
history seen as essentially traumatic for the individual
birth of trauma studies

14. ISSUES II - clinical vs. cultural
(1)Clinical practice: technical definitions
Cultural discourse: theoretical definitions
(2)trauma: the absolute ‘real’ , unrepresentable
Also: a cultural construct (ideas of what is traumatic)
Western? Modern? Historically specific?
Analysts accused of inducing false traumatic memories

15. ISSUES III – the extension of trauma
Primary trauma victims
relatives, family members, doctors, carers
‘bystander trauma’ – trivialisation of trauma (theoretical and moral issues)
mediatised trauma - vicarious trauma
9/11
descendants (Marianne Hirsch: postmemory)

16. What is trauma? (1) a single overwhelming event OR
prolonged mental suffering/abuse (anxiety, terror, horror)
(2) Event or psychic response - powerlessness
Symptoms: jumpiness, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks
amnesia
incapacitation (helplessness), psychic paralysis

17. Cathy Caruth: “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intensive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (or avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event.”

18. Dominick LaCapra: “Trauma is a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence; it has belated effects that are controlled only with difficulty and perhaps never fully mastered”
trauma as ‘normal’ – losses
are we all traumatised? (trauma of birth)
trauma as identity (Ancient Mariner)

19. dissociation trauma: not understood
split – unintegrated experience/affect
dissociation
LaCapra: “there is an important sense in which the after-effects – tha hauntingly possessive ghosts – of traumatic events are not fully owned by anyone and, in various ways, affect everyone”
‘unclaimed experience’ (Cathy Caruth)

20. Charlotte Delbo was asked if she has been living with Auschwitz after her experiences. "No, I live beside it. Auschwitz is there, fixed and unchangeable, but wrapped in the impervious skin of memory that segregates itself from the present 'me‘. Unlike the snake's skin, the skin of memory doesn't renew itself... I have the feeling that the 'self' who was in the camp isn't me, isn't the person who is here, opposite you. No, it's too unbelievable. And everything that happened to this other 'self,' the one from Auschwitz, doesn't touch me now, me, doesn't concern me, so distinct are deep memory and common memory”

21. Representation of trauma
contrasting impulses of proclaiming and hiding
rape victims: ‘bad’, flawed stories
trauma shatters frames and discourses of representation
to tell = to lie? (falsify)

22. A Holocaust survivor talking to those members of her family who had moved to the US in the 1920s: ‘Because to understand us, somebody has to go through with it. Because nobody, but nobody fully understands us. You can't. No [matter] how much sympathy you give me when I'm talking here, or you understand you're trying to understand me, I know, but I don't think you could. I don't think so.’

23. Inadequacy of ordinary language
Ch. Delbo: 'Otherwise, someone [in the camps] who has been tormented by thirst for weeks would never again be able to say: 'I'm thirsty. Let's make a cup of tea.' 'Thirst' [after the war] has once more become a currently used term. On the other hand, if I dream of the thirst that I felt in Birkenau, I see myself as I was then, haggard, bereft of reason, tottering. I feel again physically that real thirst, and it's an agonizing nightmare. But if you want me to speak to you about it . . ."

24. Trauma culture (1)aestheticising trauma (avantgarde, Modernism)
(2)valorising trauma
(3)the rise of collective trauma

25. Aestheticing trauma
flawed trauma stories – avantgarde artistic strategies
trauma language as avantgarde

26. Valorising trauma a heroic conception of trauma
trauma as the stamp of authenticity
(redefinition of history as trauma)
trauma as (the proof of) contact with the real

27. Collective trauma founding traumas (Trianon, the Shoa)
clinging to one’s trauma

28. Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch)
familial memory
Art Spiegelman: Maus
Story of the father (Vladek) from 1930s to survival
Story of Art Spiegelman and his father in 1980s (testimony)
Lives of second generation descendants: dominated by memories not their own
Postmemory: mediated not through recollection but through imaginative investment

29. Maus