One of the earliest works in the field of trauma studies is Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. It was published in the year 1996. In her book, Caruth defines trauma as it is a wound inflicted not upon the body, but upon the mind” (Caruth 3). This means that psychological trauma deals with the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and of the world. It is not like a physical wound on the body which can heal with time, but rather it is a wound on the psyche of a person. Her theory created a conceptual framework through which the role of trauma could be studied in humanities in the 20th century. It opened up questions and avenues of enquiry in the field of trauma studies. According to Caruth the nature of trauma is understood by observing the effects of trauma on the victim, what triggers it and what effects are suffered by the victims.
In
her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative and History she now and then refers to Freud who defines trauma
in his essay Beyond the Pleasure
Principle as
It is not, like the wound of the body, a
simple healable event, but rather an event… not locatable in simple violent or
original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very
unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance
– returns to haunt the survivor later on (Freud 4).
Trauma is therefore the wound that cries out,
that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or a truth that is
otherwise not available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated
address, can not only be linked to what is known, but also to what remains
unknown in our every actions and our language.
According
to Caruth, trauma is like a ‘double wound’. By double wound she means that
trauma is repeated infliction of a wound on the psyche of an individual. This can
be explained with an example. Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemm Liberata narrates the story of its hero, Tancred, who
unwillingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the
armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange
magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his
sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda,
whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded
his beloved once again. The actions of Tancred, wounding his beloved in a
battle and then, unknowingly, wounding her again expresses the way that the
experience of trauma repeats itself. The story of the wounding offers a parable
for the traumatic experience. From the original wounding of Clorinda to the
wounding of the tree can be seen as the story of the emergence of the meaning
of trauma from its bodily referent to its psychic extension.
Caruth
also emphasizes on the relation between language and trauma. She states that if
Freud turns to literature it is so because it is through literature only such
events and experiences can be narrated. The role of language here is
therapeutic in nature and is like a therapeutic treatment of the trauma.
Caruth
states that trauma is the recapturing of the past. Trauma does not simply serve
as a record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that
is not fully accepted. The most striking feature of a traumatic recollection is
the fact that it is not just a memory. It is in fact a traumatic reliving,
which seems like a waking memory, which might occur repeatedly only in the form
of a dream. Freud states:
[People] think the fact that the traumatic experience
forcing itself upon the patient is a proof of the strength of the experience:
the patient is, as one might say, fixated to his trauma …. I am not aware,
however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in
their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps, they are more
concerned with not thinking of it.
(Freud
13).
The history that a flashback tells is
therefore, a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which
it was not yet fully owned or experienced, nor in the present, in which its
precise image and enactments are not fully understood. Therefore, for a
survivor of a traumatic experience, the truth of an event then does not only
reside in the brutal facts of that event, but also in the way that their
occurrence defies simple comprehension.
In her book, Caruth engages Freud's theory of
trauma as outlined in Moses and
Monotheism and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”; the notion of reference and
the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of
personal catastrophe in Hiroshima Mon Amour;
and the traumatic address in Lecompte's reinterpretation of Freud's narrative
of the dream of the burning child, each explaining the gap between experience
and knowledge that is trauma through the analysis of a particular work of
fiction.
Likewise,
Freud in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in which he talks about the pleasure principle which is the
instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain in order to satisfy
biological or psychological needs. The pleasure principle is the driving force
guiding the Id. In the second section of the essay Freud analyses the traumatic
experiences of the WWI veterans. Freud puts to rest the traditional belief that
trauma is a result of physical injuries. However, he turns from “the dark and
dismal topic traumatic neurosis” (Freud 50) to children’s play. In the case of
children’s play he focuses on the actions of a young boy who repeatedly threw
his toys away from him while attempting to say fort (gone) and da (here)
in his mother’s absence. The repetition
of such experiences is an attempt to master an experience that was too intense,
difficult to bear or in this case the abandonment of the child by its mother.
Therefore, traumatic experiences are the expression of unmastered separation. A
separation so painful that the imitation of death is preferable.
Source: "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History" written by Cathy Caruth (1996)
Cathy Caruth's Ashes of History : https://youtu.be/1REBql6hD1A
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