Texte /Edelyn Schweidson /E.G.P.

                  Patients traumatized by events beyond the limits of human experiential endurability often reveal a shattered self with no continuous personal core. These events seem to have occurred with no witness possibly because their inhumanity caused the subject to disappear while they were taking place. Such patients suffer from the sudden emergence of dissociated sets of memories which seem to have registered the entire circumstances of the trauma in a frozen state.
                  The therapist's interventions seem to have no impact at these moments. This may be so because there is a self other than the patient's that is present at a scene which belongs to a past that never ceases to recur. These reenactments of past trauma reveal a self condemned to a disbelief of being heard whenever testifying to an inhuman situation devoid of any subjectivity.
                  Vignettes from the psychoanalytic treatment of a patient who suffered from traumatic «memories» will illustrate the points above. The testimonies of homeless children and of Holocaust survivors also point to this silencing of voices wounded by an inhuman past. Questions regarding the ethical dimension of Psychoanalysis and its witnessing to present day injustices -- as opposed to silencing them -- are addressed.

                  Lévinas(1) addresses trauma as the foundational substitution of the Other for the identical that entails our responsibility for and vulnerability to others. Thus we enter the symbolic domain with our unconscious -- the initial site of our communal belonging -- represented by this Other who awakens us to our humanity. This pre-ontological trauma which shatters our sameness and introduces us to language as dialogue can be historically reawakened whenever another's suffering addresses us or when an inhuman disregard petrifies time and silences words.
                  Work with patients who underwent severe trauma in their past -- through events beyond the limits of human experiential endurability -- often reveals a shattered self and an absence of a continuous personal core. The traumatic events seem to have occurred without anyone who was able to symbolize them, possibly because their inhumanity caused the subject to disappear when they were taking place. Such patients suffer from the emergence of dissociated sets of memories which seem to have registered the circumstances of the trauma in a frozen state.
                  It appears that nothing the therapist may do or say has any impact at these moments. This may be so because the patient's self is not at the scene which itself belongs to a past inaccessible to dialogue. These unwitnessed traumas grip the subject who suffers their endless reenactments. This replaying of traumas resistant to symbolization may represent renewed attempts at testimony and address that end in failure and disaster.
                  A therapeutic intervention with homeless children (2) often confronts us with wounds our words cannot dress nor reach. These young subjects seem prey to reenactments of a horror they cannot testify to. Whenever they are asked in groups to enter a transitional space of fictional narrative, they tend to decree its impossibility by the acting out of life endangering scenes in which ritualistic self and others'destruction take place.
                  Oral storytelling has been used in this kind of work. Benjamin (3) describes it as an artisan community's weaving of the invisible threads that transmit its experiences through time with subsequent tellers leaving their singular traces upon it. Homeless children seem to have fallen out of the communal narrative fabric which in coming apart did not sustain them. Trauma has robbed them of their memories and they seem to live in the outer surface of an impermeable consciousness which isolates them from others, their pasts and from the discovery of their future in these pasts. Reacting to an universe with no narratives they do not find a community in themselves and ceaselessly repeat the silence of their origins when they were not welcomed into an ongoing storytelling that they would participate in unfolding.
                  Some homeless children initiated a narrative. A paradigmatic first story would start: «There was a beast so bad and ugly that nobody wanted it, and he would destroy everyone around him...» In this first attempt at storytelling there is an indication of traumatic beginnings with the children cast in the role of evil whose elimination would restore closure to the social narrative. The identificatory trace imprinted upon these young subjects as monstruous reveals the official social narrative as maintaining them in the silence of acting outs.
                  Themes of precocious death are frequent. An eleven-year-old who ran away from home to escape physical abuse which occurred whenever he did not bring money to his parents, tells a recurrent dream. In the dream, he is already eighteen years old and on the way to commit a robbery when he is shot dead. He wants to become a judge; his dream indicates no escape from traumas undergone.
                  There is a a yearning for home and family in all of these children, even in those whose experience of them has been horror. One child's story tells of a mother who beats her son if he does not bring her money. One day, he steals some money and spends it on games. Afraid of his mother, he sleeps on the streets, and policemen shoot him dead. Since he is so young, angels have pity on him and bring him back to life; he goes home to his mother who hits him, and he laughs happily: he would endure anything to be close to his mother.
                  Ferenczi (4) envisions trauma as the often masochistic replay of abusive events with the subject leaving his body not to experience the assault while at the same time clinging to the assailant's subjectivity to maintain some grip on life and on a delusional semblance of regard for him -- even if through the selfsame annihilating disregard. However in the story above, the child has entered the potential space of narrative creation as the author of his story addressed as a «writing» in the tape recorder, leaving there the trace of his name, and perhaps starting the erasure -- as a creative trans-forming -- of the uninscripted trauma. The playful moment is like a suturing of the wound of trauma by a voice in «polilogue»(5) with other voices in the poliphony of communal narrative.
                  Some children however have been too severely maimed by abandonment and are unable to make up a narrative: an eleven year-old boy who had been locked in a pig's manger outside the house started a dialogue with me. In it, he would repeatedly point to a puppet and ask its name; he would then say the learned name while pointing to another puppet and asking if this was its name. A dialogical beginning was in the process of being lived by us when it was briefly interrupted by my absence. When I returned this child, with a blank expression, was repeatedly enacting sexual abuse upon the puppets. This boy had not been provided with an intersubjective matrix to depend upon and through which he could have endured an absence filled with his meaningful others. Instead, the void of separation made him prey of thanatic pulsions that kept him reenacting the trauma he had been through. His beginnings of dialogue were not supported by any consistent prior dialogical experience that would have allowed him to sustain narrative constructions in the physical absence of an interlocutor. In the fort-da (6) this child may have never said Fort! , because there had not been a Da!; so his Fort -- himself gone -- had become eternal.
                  Children on the brink of homelessness in slum areas of the city narrate about homes that do not keep nor guide them and of dances which are chaotic wars. In front of us this narrational violent chaos is enacted by the children involved in the storytelling. Whoever narrates does not use an «I» but a «we»-- as if he has lost his singularity in the group and this latter -- a «we» that is an «it» has become the narrator. the listeners seem to lose their singularities too; they are carried away, laughing, at the brutal episodes stitched together. The violence is like a narcotic which substitutes for absent authorities and interlocutors. Such violence splits them and puts them outside themselves. The group is a headless mass of spoken fragments which is only brought together by violence itself. « Everything broken... bottles flying everywhere...»; were they themselves in pieces uniting in the group experiences of fragmentation? Decreeing the impossibility of a narrative, these young subjects reveal that they have no interlocutors to engage in narrative constructions and the violence which glues them together in a group points to shattering events that let loose destruction from an unspeakable past.
                  Survivors of disaster through writings and oral testimonies bear witness to horrors undergone. Many do it at the cost of their lives as if the unspeakable to which they tried to give witness would not consent to being survived and disclosed. The trauma of no one to address while undergoing horror invades survivors' dreams, writings and lives, often making it impossible to proceed. Celan realized from the center of his solitude that no one bears witness for the witness(7). He lost his parents in the Holocaust and tried both to express the inexpressible and to reach «heartland» through his poetry he considered a «handshake» and «messages in a bottle»(8,115). His writing is a ceaseless testimony to those who were murdered. He attempts to experience the Other's death as his own aiming his poetry at a self retraumatizing and as such a wounding and/or as an awakening as a survivor awakened to an address (9). This awakening is itself traumatic given the ethical necessity and impossibility of responding to another's death (1).
                  To transmit the experience of horror through language he submitted it to fragmentation and distortion reducing it at times to the evocation of an anonymous fragmented corpse; and, as he tried with and through language to undergo the silencing of voices that had taken place, in his poems he also attempted to make present the «now fallen into historylessness » (8,114) past, and the petrified desolate landscape « a region in which human beings and books [a whole culture] used to live »(8,114) had been reduced to. At the same time his work is a constant interpellation, an address to a No One he seems intent on -- while also dispairing of -- ressurrecting.
                  Celan made language itself the bearer of undergone catastrophe: « It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening....» (8,114-115). He has doubts as to the destiny of his poem: « A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the -- not always greatly hopeful -- belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. »(8,115). These poems are « ...reality-wounded and reality-seeking. »(8,117). His poetry met with great misunderstandings: Adorno condemned all poetry after Auschwitz as making « an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning »(10); on the other hand his poems were extolled by journal articles as helping to «grasp, master and surmount [the] «shadowy force of our history» - it was as if the destinataries refused to read the messages. To clear these misunderstandings Celan increasingly changed his style into a «less melodious, more disrupted and disruptively elliptical verse.»(11,35). He writes: «You my words being crippled/together with me.../ with the hu, with the man, with the human being.»(12,187), and «... the/ grooves, the/ choirs, back then, the/ Psalms. Ho, ho-/ sanna/» (13,123).
                  He breaks down his words, disrupting any unity of conscious meaning. Sounds broken bear witness to a knowledge that surpasses them, and in whose fragmenting grips they are. Since: «A word -- you know/ a corpse. [But:] come let us wash it,/ come let us comb it,/ come let us turn/ its eye heavenward.»(14,66). As if ministering to the dead, Celan asks us to make the corpse's eye look upward instead of being shut (15). And yet: «Through/ the sluice I had to go,/ to salvage the word back into/ and out of and across the salt flood.»(16, 288). He refers to poetry as an often «despairing dialogue» (17,163) against those who see it as mere dialogue: «Nowhere/ are you asked after.» (13,120) And: «No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,/no one incants our dust./ No one./ Blessèd art thou, No One./ In thy sight would/we bloom./In thy/spite./ A Nothing/we were, are now, and ever/shall be, blooming; the Nothing-, the/No One's-Rose./ (18,167).
                  The testimony regards another, and in his solitude «...the witness testifies to what has been said through him.» (19,115). However this self retraumatizing through writing repeats the horror of the missed encounter with death -- No one -- as its inner truth. So this ethical imperative -- a reason for going on even when this is impossible -- may prove unendurable and destroy the witness. As a paper burnt by a writing of fire Celan's and other writers' lives were consumed by their work which testifies to unspeakable occurrences through the very destruction of these writers as impossible survivors of the unexperiencible.
                  In addition to being an address to others, testimony aims at restoring a feeling of grip over language and some form of narrative. In this regard some thoughts may be advanced as to different traumatic events in relation to language. Homeless children were not welcomed into a language: They feel unnamed by and unentitled to it: so they frequently attack it and inscribe their anonymous search for a name in the disruption of the ongoing narratives of monuments and cities through graffitism, for instance -- this writing against the grain. Thus they attempt to destroy boundaries that exclude them and to fragment a writing that does not inscribe them. This yearning for the inscription of their names became apparent in our work: the moment children most enjoyed was the saying of their full names into the loudspeaker and then hearing their names and stories «written» into the grooves. However, just as difficult as it is for them to enter into storytelling, as easy it is to lose it again and return to the stones they throw at others who will not hear their words and who will throw them back into the streets. To these children language is not felt as a birthright, because they were not born into it but instead traumatically thrown out of it at birth.
                  Many of the victims of Auschwitz also had a painful relation to language. Often they felt like usurpers when using the language of the culture they were born into and like impostors who by writing in this language betrayed their origins. Kafka addressed the despair of Jewish writers who wrote in German sometimes in an attempt to assimilate into the domineering culture: «...they lived with.... the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise [and] the impossibility of writing....they wanted to[assimilate], but their hindpaws were still glued in the Judaism of the father and their front paws did not find new terrain...» (20,394). The body itself is torn asunder in this identificatory conflict between cultural-linguistic allegiances in which the »new terrain» proved to be a graveyard with no gravestones. In this torn body, unnamed by the culture which accused these writers of contaminating and degrading it, Auschwitz -- a place «Where the Word that was immortal, fell » (Celan, 21,189) and which caused «Whichever word you speak-/you owe/to destruction » (22,203) -- grafted an even deeper namelessness -- «All the names, all those to-/gether burned/names. So much/ ash to bless»(23,278)-- An erasure by the domineering «culture» of identificatory marks, graffitism as history written by those in power.
                  For a long time, disbelief in patient's accounts took the form of a non-legitimizing, an imputing of responsibility to the sufferer of injuries and of insidiously reducing them to a fulfillment of desire. This frequently meant the silencing and isolation of those submitted to those in power. Since desire and the masochistic search for confirmation by the assailant are often the case, issues of reality and ethical accountability were costumarily not dealt with. Outside of Psychoanalysis voices began to question this putting the blame on the victims. Lanzmann (24) spoke of the obscenity of the project of understanding atrocity, there was a reaction to the attempted negation of Auschwitz -- a paradigm of senseless suffering -- and then its acknowledgement and address by later generations. Presently, several groups of trauma survivors are bringing their voices to the public forum to demand acknowledgment of violences suffered. Psychoanalysts are increasingly aware that blaming the victims results only in their further victimizing, that morbid fascination is a result of masochistic entrapment with aggressors, and that frequently both reality and desire are present in repeated horror.
                  However trauma often cannot become a narrative since the unspeakable is its kernel. Reenactment of trauma -- when unexperienced traumatic scenes vividly take over the subject -- may lead to retraumatizing with resulting physiological impairments (25). Trauma frequently can only be addressed through means other than verbal expression and therapeutic crisis interventions have to be recreated anew in response to the poignancy of critical moments. Theerapists have to work in the direction of helping to stabilize a self image dependent on a mirror which holds intactness to be given back to someone shattered by the inhuman.
                  L. complained of her past being a black hole and of being alone in her marriage. Her birth had been unwanted and since the age of 15 she goes through a ritual pregnancy and abortion almost every year. At the time of each abortion she promises herself she will not go through it again and she feels fraudulent because she never keeps her promise. She also feels it was another person who went through all her crisis because she has no recollections of them. She is pregnant when she comes to see me and her husband demands her to make an abortion. After deciding on an abortion and going through with it, L. collapses. She is invaded by trauma giving up all connections: she is a 10 year-old running away from a girlfriend's father who wants to abuse her and frantically rubbing herself to clean the dirt off her. Her persecutor tells her she is a dirty woman who has tried to seduce him. She walks on all fours not to be seen through the window because she is a monster. L. had never talked about this before because she feels guilty and is certain that she would be accused. Recurrent nightmares threatened the vestiges of sanity: Carried in a bag by a beggar to be cut to pieces and eaten up by mendiants, she screams for help. She gets the answer that no one would rescue her because it was alcoholic's day -- her own father is an alcoholic who introduced her as a child to prostitutes he lived with.
                  When the crisis started I could not reach L. with words. I tried to contain the terror by asking her to complete my drawing: Winnicott's approach -- the creation through the squiggle game of a potential space as a means of trying to bring L. back to the therapeutic setting -- came to mind (26). The result was an unfinished contour of a ghostly body merged through the void itself with the surrounding empty page: only the deadened traces of abandonment were there. It was through holding and having her drink milk that I was somewhat perceived and could temporarily stop her self -abortion.
                  At the time of my vacations, L.'s husband leaves her without forewarning: he told her he is tired of living with a mental paraplegic. He explained that he had talked it over with friends -- some, he stressed, were psychoanalysts -- who had advised him to leave her for her own good. A week later he moved in with another woman.
                  L. left together with him: She tried to to be in him to see herself through his eyes; and to revitalize him in an attempt to come to life again. Being hated by him was preferable to there being no one, which only repeated the impersonal shattering of herself by past trauma. For some time, I refrained from a parallel process: I was concerned that any anger she would feel might turn against herself since she could not separate from her husband, glued to him as her only means to maintain or to restore some grip on life. At some point another decision demanded itself to be taken despite my conscious one of refraining from expressing feelings: L.'s father blamed her for having lost a very good husband. She was defenseless against her father's attack, there was a threat to her life, and some crisis intervention was necessary. With the intention of trying to change l.'s father negative stance towards her or at least of neutralizing its deleterious effects I asked him to come with her to a session. He complied, only to blame L. again. If her father was right about her husband being good, the bad one was L., and at that point I disruptively intervened by voicing indignation against the husband. That started L. in an anger against me which protected her from self attack. She came to life through fighting me in an attempt to defend her husband. This fight reopened a vital process and an ongoing interchange: she was no longer in him finding fault at herself.
                  Highly disturbed patients often cannot take the responsibility for their treatment on their own, and their analysis depends on their family's assent and involvement. L.'s father consistently attacked her and her analysis. His joining in a few sessions had the effect of diminishing his attacks and also of making him admit the existence of the therapeutic process his daughter was engaged in.
                  L.'s trauma as a child was a retraumatizing of violence undergone within her original family. It may take a long while for her to talk about it again; I bring it in from time to time to legitimize the un-experience she underwent.
                  Severely disturbed patients often need a confirmation that there is someone who responds so as to leave repetitive collusions with persecutory or abandoning others. Homeless children for instance try to excuse and justify their parents even at the cost of seeing themselves as monsters who deserve the abandonment. This is done to preserve children's belief that they do have parents, no matter how, and some semblance of regard coming from them. Ferenczi (4) stood against the reductionism to mere desire and inner world. However, it is thought that the severely disturbed patient's anger against the perpretator of violence can turn against the self -- alienated in the aggressor -- and should not be encouraged. With L., there was already a strong transferential bond in the treatment when her husband left. So as I voiced feelings of indignation toward her husband in speaking for her she did not turn her anger inwards but instead towards me. We could deal with that. At the same time this disruptive intervention was like a seed for a later development of L.'s self respect when she would allow herself to become indignant at her ex-husband's inhuman disregard.
                  Some questions remain: would this intervention be ill advised with patients who have no one but the ones who left or abused them? Some psychoanalysts advise the temporary relibidinization of destructive attachments in order to revitalize the deadly stricken patient (27). But: could one not lose the patient to the attack and to destructive masochism while at the same time condoning -- (can this ever be reversed?) -- the abuse? Whenever there is a lack of concern from meaningful others, can we make up for what was missed? Sometimes this may be the only means to avoid an identification with the aggressor and the silencing of those who suffered injustice. A legitimization of suffering has to occur and it will not come from perpetrators. Since repetition is bound up with masochism, the analytic setting is the place to denounce and help bring it to a stop.
                  The severely disturbed patient does not believe someone will hear him. Present day youth indicate by deadly rituals they feel the same. Through the loosening threads of social narrative more and more segments of the population are falling out. A culture of drugs and violence numbs the pain of the non response. At the same time an ethics of responsibility towards another is coming to the fore and urging for a narrative on behalf of those who were sacrificed and those who are downtrodden. Benjamin (28) advises the brushing of history against the grain to redeem the afflicted. This should be done to to give those who were silenced access to a past that was made into stone so as to help prepare for a time when «...it's time the stone consented to bloom », as Celan once wrote.
                  Some memory is possible and necessary, some necessary and impossible, some necessarily impossible even when seemingly possible, but the goal of the narrative -- be it verbal or semiotic -- is to dissolve the pain and carry it to the sea of forgetting, according to Benjamin. A stone that blooms is a silence become an address and a past freed of its chains delivers a promise for the future. As in Lorca's lullaby : « Este galapaguito/ no tiene mare/ lo parió una gitana,/ lo echó a la calle/... Este niño chiquito/ no tiene cuna;/ su padre es carpentero/ y le hará una/ » . [This little boy doesn't have a mother; a gipsy woman gave birth to him and threw him out on the streets. This little boy doesn't have a crib; his father is a carpenter and will build him one] (29, 662). Some resolution of dread through the construction of a world of concerned response -- a cuna for a child woven by voices that attempt to address horror petrified.
                  Then witnessing with and for the other with all the vulnerability this entails may possibly become « a breathcrystal, your unannullable witness.» (30, 219).

* Originally published in The Int Forum Psychoanal 7, Scandinavian University Press, 1998.

References

1) Lévinas E. Autrement qu' être ou au-delà de l'essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
2) Schweidson E. The silenced language of abandoned Brazilina children. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata 1995; 1-2: 51-96.
3) Benjamin W. The storyteller. In Arendt H., ed. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 83-109.
4) Ferenczi S. Journal clinique. Paris: Payot, 1985.
5) Backtine M. Esthétique de la création verbale. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.
6) Freud S. Beyond the pleasure principle (1920). London: Hogarth Press, 1962: SE 18: 3-64.
7) Celan P. Breathturn. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995.
8) Celan P. Bremen speech. In Felstiner, J. author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
9) Celan P. Winter. In Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
10) Adorno TW. Zur Dialektik des Engagements. Neue Rundschau 1962; 73/1: 103.
11) Felman S. Education and crisis. In: Felman S, Laub D, eds. Testimony. New York: Routledge, 1992: 1-56.
12) Celan P. ...plashes the fountain. In: Hamburger M, transl. Poems of Paul Celan. New York: Persea Books, 1972.
13) Celan P. Stretto. In: Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
14) Celan P. Nocturnally pursed... In: Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
15) Felstiner J. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
16) Celan P. The sluice. In: Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
17) Celan P. The meridian. In: Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
18) Celan P. Psalm. In: Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
19) Lévinas E. Éthique et infini: dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. Paris, Fayard, 1982.
20) Kafka F. Correspondance 1902-1924. Paris, Gallimard, 1965.
21) Celan P. Where the word. In Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
22) Celan P. Whichever stone you lift. In Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
23) Celan P. Chemical. In Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
24) Lanzmann C. The obscenity of understanding. In Caruth C, ed. Trauma: explorations in memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995: 200-220.
25) Caruth C. Traumatic departures: survival and history in Freud. In Strozier CB, Flynn M, eds. Trauma and self. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996: 29-46.
26) Winnicott DW. Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
27) Schneider M. La séduction traumatique. Psychanalistes: Revue du Collège de Psychanalistes 1992; 45: 35-46.
28) Benjamin W. Theses on the philosophy of history. In Arendt H, ed. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 253-264.
29) Lorca FG. Federico Garcia Lorca: obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1967.
30) Celan P. Bitten away. In Felstiner J, author and transl. Paul Celan: poet, survivor, jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.