Understanding Trauma in Psychoanalysis
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ScribdTranslationsUnderstanding Trauma in Psychoanalysis
Translated by
ScribdTranslationsTHE INVERTED TRAUMA - ÉRIC LAURENT
Cynthia N. de Freitas Farias
Conference delivered in 2002, still under the impact
of the recently occurred attack on the twin towers, event
that inaugurated a new perspective regarding the
that until then was lived, at least in the West.
Originally published in Ornicar digital, number
204, and in Portuguese in 'Psychoanalysis Papers', vol.
1, n. 1., this text by Laurent is among the main references on the
issue of trauma by providing precise theoretical guidelines about the
theme.
Laurent makes an introduction around what he calls the generalization of trauma.
We can consider traumatic the events that exceed the comments that
we can make of them. This implies that the term trauma or traumatic designates
what is situated "in the interface between the scientific description of the world and a
cultural phenomenon that exceeds and gains notoriety at a time when we
we benefit from a better description of the world. If, on one hand, we rely
with the scientific technological advancement to explain the world, on the other hand, we have as
response to the increase in what is called post-traumatic stress syndrome. Everything
What escapes programming becomes traumatic. (pp. 21 and 22)
Laurent comments that events that were part of ordinary life gain, with
time, trauma status, such as, for example, rape that ceases to be
a common law offense and is recognized as trauma,
provoking long-lasting subjective consequences.
Psychoanalysis was founded on the abandonment of trauma as a contingency.
related to seduction, to find in one's own sexuality the cause
necessary to the discomfort. Twenty-five years later, at the end of the First World War,
Freud found a new meaning in traumatic events and the diseases associated with them.
associates, locating there the failure of the pleasure principle and the manifestation
of the death drive.
Laurent proposes to think about how we can resume what was at stake.
for Freud in the dream repetition of the traumatic scene in traumatized individuals
war that, differently from neurotic repetition, denoted precisely its
failure, the failure of defenses, a failure of the shield of para-excitation.
The question now is how to reinterpret these Freudian energetic metaphors.
the issue of trauma is a touchstone. It seems, in fact, to be,
by excellence, the place of energy, of the quantity of diffraction” (p. 23).
For Freud, neurosis was based on a
primary loss, the loss of the maternal object,
configuring itself as the model of all
traumas"(p. 24). Therefore, the object is never
found, but always found again, as
he claims in 1925 in the text about "The Negative".
Lacan revisited this primordial loss in the light of linguistics and positioned trauma in
language. Reformulated Freud's thesis in the following way: 'we came to
world with a parasite that he calls the unconscious" (p. 24). Once that
we enter the language we experience something that 'lives differently from the living'.
If we are not excessively crushed by the misunderstanding of our own
structure, we managed to talk, but we experienced the fact of never again
we leave the language. At this point in Lacan's teaching, the prevalence of
symbolic pushed the real to its edges and, with it, the phenomena that
they were out of context. Then he located the trauma.
To think about the logical place of trauma in its teaching, Lacan proposes the resource
of a private space, the torus, a three-dimensional shape that allows to unite, in a
unique region, the peripheral exteriority and the central exteriority. Thus it is
it is possible to logically address the psychological distance in relation to trauma. This
the approach allows to include in the same space what Freud had difficulties with
to approach, when trying to locate the trauma between the contingent event and what is
intrinsic to sexuality. (pp. 24 and 25)
From the perspective of the language inscribed on the torus,
Laurent points out two aspects of trauma in
Lacan: the first, the trauma as a hole in the symbolic,
related to primary education and, the second, to
language making a hole in the real, the trauma upside down,
what we find in Lacan's final teaching.
In the first aspect, the symbolic is taken as the system of Vorstellungen.
through which the subject wants to find the presence of a real. The symptom
figure there in its formal wrapping. It also includes the symbolic, the real as
this point in the peripheral exterior, outside representation. "He (the bull)
allows the real to appear in 'internal exclusion to the symbolic'" (p. 25). The symptom is the
response of the subject to the traumatic real due to the impossibility of the symbolic absorbing it
the anguish in its general sense refers
to that.
Laurent observes that from this model taken separately from its reverse.
deduce the following treatment: cover the hole with meaning. (...) 'in the accident
but contingent, the restitution of the meaning plot, the inscription of trauma in the
unconscious particularity of the subject, ghost and symptom, is curative.” (p. 25)
From this also derives the place of the analyst as that of a 'hermeneutic hero'.
a donor of meaning. If trauma has the effect of tearing the subject away from
speeches in which he is immersed, the analyst, in this case, operates by returning
the subject to its place in these discourses. Laurent asserts that in this case, the
Psychoanalysis takes the unconscious as a "device that produces meaning.
libidinal"(p. 25). If, on one hand, it preserves the subject from their inscription in
categories, ensuring their particularity, is still a means of
to produce recognition, therefore, meaning, denying in a certain way that the
the unconscious always emerges in its dimension of rupture with meaning
established.
In the second aspect, the trauma of the real is understood as 'has symbolic in
real”. The language parasites the living. The rules that compose the Other of the bond
social norms are inaccessible. We follow what we have learned from others, but
the meaning of these rules is invented from a point outside of meaning,
giving consistency to the Other, this one that does not exist.
In this perspective, after a trauma, it is necessary to reinvent another one that
it no longer exists. It is necessary to create a subject so that it can rediscover the rules
of life with a Lost Other. One does not learn to live again with an Other
lost in this way. A new path is created by the trauma.
It is primarily through the path of the senseless, of the ghost and of the symptom that this path is
traces. It is through what exceeds all possible meaning in the libidinal cause that
this way is possible." (p. 26)
However, this invention arises from a missing rule that is at the center.
of language, and that makes it traumatic: the sexual relationship that does not exist. This
allows Lacan to assert that the trauma is sexual. In this perspective, the place of
analyst is the place of the lost object. 'Seele can help a subject to
re-finding the word after a trauma, is because he is able to be,
himself, in the place of trauma. The analyst is traumatic, just like the trauma itself.
language. (p.26) The analyst knows that language, at its core, remains outside
of meaning, and by traumatizing common discourse it brings forth discourse
unconscious. By the way, Laurent evokes the title of the song by the performing artist.
Laurie Anderson, Language is a Virus. (p. 26).
He proposes that we think of analysis in two aspects: analysis as narration,
in the direction of the way, and the analysis as installation, which would approach the
installations we come across in museums nowadays. A
precarious installation. Take as an example the installation by artist John Leaños
que reconstituiu em sua obra uma“pseuso-exposiçãoarqueológica”intitulada
Remembering castration dedicated à culture Aztec
([Link] which had ritual castration
in its center. For Laurent, when castration no longer brings anything of
tragic, there's nothing left to do but play with it. "The entire installation is a kind of operation
fragile about what remains for us of meaning around the phallus. It is better to conceive the
an analysis like this, as a narrative metaphor full of meaning. The
analyst, in this second position, is situated beyond or short of a conception
"therapeutic of non-meaning" (p. 27).
According to Laurent, although language is part of
two codes that encode the lived experience,
she does not have the world as her final reference
common and shared. On the contrary, it is
just the linguistic trauma that is to us
common and creates an obstacle to the constitution of a
common and shared world. The non-existence
the sexual relationship is common in speaking, and it is in this failure that are inscribed the
fragmented objects of pleasure. The originality of psychoanalysis, asserts Laurent, is
to be able to keep together the right and the reverse of trauma, a perspective that leads to the
analyst moving from discomfort in civilization to addressing civilization and its
trauma (pp. 27 and 28).
References
Laurent, É. (2004) O trauma ao avesso. Papéis de psicanálise, vol. 1, n. 1, pp. 21-28.
Freud, S. (1969). A negativa (1925). Obras Completas, vol XIX, pp. 295-307.