“The Art of Mis-Reading: Woolf`s Autobiographical Essays”

“Autobiography, Trauma
Theory and Lacan ”
NICOLAS PIERRE BOILEAU
LERMA, EA 853, AMU
UNIVERSITÉ AIX-MARSEILLE
Une conférence de la journée d’études
« La réception de Lacan à l’Université »
Centre TIL : Texte, Image, Langage , et
Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et Transculturelles (C.R.I.T.)
Réalisation technique d’AIDE-numérique – PSIUN – UB – (FS)
Introduction
1. “the cultural awareness that something significant was
happening around and through memoir crystallized in relation to
the recognition of trauma’s centrality to it.” (Gilmore, 2)
Trauma Theory without Psychoanalysis
2. “Freud has gone out of fashion, and now some historians of
psychoanalysis scurry like old-time undertakers to the scene of
the most recent exposure, hoping to drum up some trade for the
burial business.” (Antze & Lambek, 76)
3. “more on the person’s subjective perceptions of fear, threat,
and risk to well-being” (Brown)
4. ‘In classic medical usage ‘trauma’ refers not to the injury
inflicted but to the blow that inflicted it, not to the state of mind
that ensues but to the event that provoked it. […] The location of
the term has been shifting from [the blow to the injury].’ (Erikson,
184)
5. “overwhelming experience of sudden and catastrophic event sin
which responsibility to the events occurs in often uncontrolled,
repetitive hallucinations” (Caruth, 59-60)
6. “Once again, Woolf’s self-analysis is consistent with what
trauma survivors and experts tell us when they try to name the
‘essence’ of what abusers aim to destroy.” (Cramer)
7. “increasingly memory worth talking about – worth
remembering, is memory of trauma” (Antze & Lambek, xii)
Trauma Against Psychoanalysis
8. “Might the therapeutic power of psychoanalysis reside more in
the experience of “rememory” or re-enactment than in the scene
of transference posited by Freud?” (Henke)
9. “the defining mark of personal identity” and Ian Hacking’s
argument that “the forgotten is the formative”, Ruth Leys
“suggest[s] that, at the limit, it is precisely what cannot be
remembered that is decisive for the subject – and for
psychoanalysis.”
10. Numerous neurophysiologists think that “their” unconscious
is hardly different from the one of psychoanalysts: it is, according
to them, frozen memories stowed away safely somewhere in the
brain. … The unconscious is thus considered as this exhaustive
registering of the past. The unconscious however is not
specifically defined as memories that are forgotten and that only
need to be stimulated so they re-appear… A memory (and with it
the stock of related symbols) remains unconscious not because it
has been forgotten, but because the subject cannot grasp its
effect/ affect. The absence of the subject is what makes it
unconscious, when the event is often remembered very well and
every day to boot (as can be seen in some traumatic scenes).
(Pommier, 219-220, my translation)
11. The aesthetic theory that dominates this field has emerged from
the work of Lyotard, Derrida and Cathy Caruth’s revision of Paul
de Man and reads trauma as an aporia of representation, placing
emphasis on difficulty, rupture and impossibility, consistently
privileging aesthetic experimentation. Meanwhile, our culture is
saturated with stories that see trauma not as a blockage but a
positive spur to narrative. (Luckhurst, 82-83)
Trauma With Psychoanalysis
12. “The place of the real, which goes from trauma to fantasy – in as
much as fantasy is never anything more than the screen that
conceals something that is quite primary and determinant in the
function of repetition – here is what needs to be understood now.”
(Lacan, 70)
13. “the repetition which ‘emerges as the unwitting reenactment of
an event that one cannot simply leave behind” and “the enigma of
the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound.”
(Caruth, 31)
14. “It is not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic
experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of
that which is unassimilable in it – in the form of the trauma,
determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently
accidental origin?” (Caruth, 101)
15. I would suggest that it is this crisis of truth, the historical
enigma betrayed by trauma, that poses the greatest challenge to
psychoanalysis, and is being felt more broadly at the centre of
trauma research today. For the attempt to understand trauma
brings one repeatedly to this peculiar paradox: that in trauma the
greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute
numbing to it, that immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take
the form of belatedness.” (Caruth, ed., 6)
16. “Really, if you want to write you have to be desperate… The thing
which prompts you to sit down and write must be something which
haunts you.” (Henke, Shattered Subjects)
17. “Oblivious of the full psychological impact of trauma, she is
plagued by symptoms of hyperarousal whenever she hears lyrical
echoes of her sister’s name” claims Henke with no rhetorical frills
(Henke, 84)
18. “Terrified of the specular gaze of a hostile world, Janet succumbs
to post-traumatic dysphoria: ‘Loss, death, I was philosophical about
everything: I still had my writing, … and if necessary I could use my
schizophrenia to survive’. (A 212)”(Henke, 88)
Conclusion
19. “I have discussed these issues at length because I want to argue
that Janet Frame’s psychiatric case history gives evidence of
abnormal bereavement and post-traumatic stress disorder, but no
evidence whatsoever of schizophrenia.” (92)
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