Michelle Balaev's "Trauma Studies" (Summary)

 

 

The field of trauma studies revolves around the examination of psychological trauma, its portrayal in language, and the role of memory in shaping individual and cultural identities. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories on trauma and incorporating additional frameworks such as poststructuralism, sociocultural theory, and postcolonial theory, scholars analyze representations of extreme experiences and their effects on identity and memory.

 

Trauma is generally understood as a profoundly disruptive experience that deeply affects one's emotional organization and perception of the external world. Trauma studies explore its impact in literature and society by examining its psychological, rhetorical, and cultural significance. Scholars delve into the complex interplay of psychological and social factors that influence how individuals comprehend traumatic experiences and how language both shapes and is shaped by these experiences.

 

In its early stages during the 1990s, trauma studies heavily relied on Freudian theory to construct a model of trauma wherein extreme experiences were deemed essentially unrepresentable, challenging the limits of language and even rupturing meaning altogether. However, this traditional model has since been supplemented by a more pluralistic approach. This alternative perspective suggests that the assumed unspeakability of trauma is just one possible response to extreme events, rather than its defining characteristic.

 

While the notion that trauma challenges the limits of language and fragments the psyche continues to influence the field, alternative approaches have emerged, displacing this singular perspective. Nevertheless, the formal innovations of texts—whether in print or other media—that shed light on the ways identity, the unconscious, and remembering are influenced by traumatic events remain central to the discourse in trauma studies.

Starting with Freud

Freud's theories on traumatic experience and memory serve as foundational psychological concepts in the field of trauma studies. These theories emerged from the nineteenth-century study of shock and hysteria by researchers such as Joseph Breuer, Pierre Janet, Jean-Martin Charcot, and others, culminating in Freud's seminal works like "Studies on Hysteria" (1895) and "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920).

 

In "Studies on Hysteria," Freud and Breuer proposed that traumatic hysteria arises from a repressed, earlier experience, particularly of sexual assault. They argued that the original event itself may not have been traumatic but becomes so through its remembrance. The process of remembering, often through psychotherapy like the talking cure or abreaction, is essential for understanding and overcoming the symptoms caused by the past event. Traumatic memories, termed "pathogenic reminiscences," inflict psychological pain and contribute to dissociation or splitting of the ego.

 

Freud's later work in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" expanded on these ideas, focusing on traumatic neurosis and the compulsion to repeat the memory of painful events. Trauma is seen as both an external shock and an internal defense mechanism against overstimulation. Traumatic neurosis involves a breach in the protective barrier against stimuli, leading to the compulsion to repeat the traumatic memory in hopes of mastering the unpleasant feelings associated with it.

 

Freud emphasized the importance of narrative recall in integrating traumatic memories into the psyche. However, he remained ambivalent about the permanence of traumatic memory and whether experiences leave permanent traces in the mind. The medicalization of trauma culminated in the American Psychiatric Association's classification of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, marking trauma as a distinct psychological disorder characterized by intense fear, terror, and helplessness.

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Literary Trauma Theory: Caruth and the First Wave

 

Freud's theories, particularly those regarding the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences, the fragmentation of the psyche, and the unique nature of traumatic memory, have been instrumental in shaping the field of trauma studies. This area of scholarship explores how trauma influences memory, identity, and language, especially in literary texts where representations of extreme experiences are analyzed.

 

In the traditional Freudian model adopted by scholars like Cathy Caruth, trauma is perceived as an event that shatters consciousness and defies direct linguistic representation. Traumatic experiences are seen as unassimilated events that fracture identity and resist integration into narrative memory. Dissociation, a defense mechanism against overwhelming stimuli, is central to trauma, leading to its incomprehensibility and unspeakability. Trauma's impact on individuals and collective groups underscores the connection between personal and political realms, highlighting the universal effects of extreme experiences on consciousness and narrative recall.

 

Caruth's influential work, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History" (1996), builds upon Freud's theories to explore trauma's disruptive influence on memory and language. She argues that traumatic experiences, whether individual or collective, are never fully known but are instead represented through fragmented narratives that gesture towards the incomprehensibility of the past. Trauma's paradoxical nature, wherein the desire to understand the past conflicts with the inability to fully grasp it, creates a tension between knowing and not knowing.

 

Caruth's analysis emphasizes the rhetorical potential of recurring motifs in texts, which symbolize the fragmented nature of traumatic memory and history. Trauma, as conceptualized in this model, defies easy assimilation into the psyche and memory, resulting in a distorted and approximate recall rather than a determinate knowledge. Additionally, Caruth incorporates neurobiological perspectives, such as Bessel van der Kolk's concept of "speechless terror," to underscore trauma's profound impact on consciousness and its resistance to linguistic organization.

The concept of trauma's transhistorical and intergenerational impact underscores its universal effects on identity and memory, both at the individual and collective levels. Cathy Caruth, drawing on Freud's theories, suggests that trauma transcends time and implicates individuals across generations in each other's traumas. This perspective highlights trauma's infectious potential and its ability to persist outside of linear time, defying narrative assimilation into memory.

 

The connection between individual and collective experiences of trauma emphasizes the fragmentation or dissociation of consciousness, leading to a temporal gap in which the meaning of the experience remains indeterminate. Caruth argues that trauma disrupts the mind's experience of time, causing emotional suffering and rendering the event unlocatable in a coherent narrative. Despite its unrepresentability, the traumatic past continues to exert its influence on consciousness, creating an absence that gestures towards the event's existence while resisting epistemological or ethical determinacy.

 

This notion of trauma's unrepresentability has been central to subsequent scholarship in the field, with scholars such as J. Brooks Bouson, Suzette Henke, Deborah Horvitz, Michael Rothberg, and Laurie Vickroy expanding upon Caruth's framework. While maintaining the traditional Freudian-Caruthian concept of trauma, these scholars incorporate feminist, race, and postcolonial theories to analyze the social and cultural implications of extreme experiences and traumatic memory.

 

For example, Bouson examines the trauma of racist institutions endured by the African American community in Toni Morrison's novels, while Vickroy explores the formal innovations in narratives of trauma in contemporary fiction. Rothberg situates his analysis within a cultural studies framework, examining how traumatic experience produces both a narrative mode and a social response that reflect on the formal limits of representation.

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Pluralistic Trauma Theory: A New Model

Criticism in trauma studies has evolved into a theoretical pluralism that challenges the traditional Caruthian model, which emphasizes trauma's unspeakable nature and its dissociative effects on consciousness and memory. This pluralistic approach seeks to understand not only the structural dimensions of trauma but also its cultural dimensions and the diversity of narrative expression it elicits. Rather than solely focusing on pathological fragmentation, this model suggests that traumatic experiences can lead to new understandings of the self and the world.

 

Scholars such as Ann Cvetkovich, Greg Forter, Amy Hungerford, Naomi Mandel, and others have contributed to this pluralistic perspective. In this model, trauma is seen as an event that alters perception and identity, leading to the formation of new knowledge about oneself and the external world. Traumatic events may result in an ambiguous understanding of the past, but they can also offer determinate meaning, highlighting the variability of traumatic experiences and their representations.

 

Unlike the traditional model, which often emphasizes trauma's inherent unspeakability, the pluralistic model acknowledges the influence of external cultural factors on the meaning of traumatic events. Memory, viewed as a fluid process of reconstruction rather than a static entity, is shaped by social and cultural contexts, impacting narrative recall and the creation of knowledge about the past.

 

This approach suggests that traumatic memory, while disruptive, may not always cause pathological symptoms that prevent its retrieval and assimilation into identity. Instead, the recollection process is influenced by cultural and historical contexts, shaping the narrative of traumatic memory and allowing for multiple determinacies of value.

 

By focusing on trauma's specificity and the cultural context of individual and collective experiences, this pluralistic model enables a deeper understanding of representations of extreme experiences such as rape, war, genocide, slavery, and colonial oppression. Scholars in this field emphasize the importance of considering social and cultural factors in interpreting trauma, moving beyond the notion of trauma as an unspeakable absence to explore its diverse meanings and impacts.

In "Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America" (2006), Naomi Mandel challenges the traditional concept of trauma as unspeakable, arguing that it serves as a "discursive production" that avoids moral responsibility in representing atrocities. Mandel suggests that silence and forgetting are strategic gestures by both the subjugated and subjugating cultures. Similarly, Ann Cvetkovich's "An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures" (2003) explores trauma beyond pathology, focusing on its specificities in butch-femme discourses and lesbian public cultures. She argues that trauma, including sexual trauma, lays the foundation for the formation of public cultures.

 

Greg Forter, in his work "Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism" (2011), adapts the Freudian-Caruthian trauma model to distinguish between "punctual" trauma, a catastrophic event, and "non-punctual" trauma, an ongoing experience. He introduces the concept of "signification trauma," which allows for a transformative understanding of traumatic experiences. Forter's recent work applies this model to postcolonial novels, emphasizing the social, political, and cultural forces at play in representations of trauma. He argues that trauma's unrepresentable nature is not due to its being beyond history and representation but is instead a result of enforced ruptures with precolonial pasts and prohibitions against remembrance imposed by specific regimes of power.

 

The field of trauma studies continues to evolve, incorporating perspectives from postcolonialism, feminist theory, ethnic studies, and ecocriticism. Recent collections such as "Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory" and "The Future of Trauma Theory" further explore the sociocultural and semiotic implications of trauma in literature. This breadth of criticism demonstrates the versatility and ongoing relevance of trauma studies to literary theory.