Trauma and Public Memory

Introduction

Jane Goodall and Christopher Lee

During the past two decades, there has been a rapid growth in the literature on traumatic memory and a corresponding diversification in focus, but what remains missing from the expanding field of commentary is any sustained consideration of how those who are outsiders to the experience deal with the challenge of its presence in their world. Related to this are some fundamental questions about how traumatic events are acknowledged in the public domain, and come to form part of the fabric of public memory.
This collection of essays and interviews offers perspectives on traumatic experience from the social and public side of the equation. Like other books in the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series, it is concerned with redressing the balance of public memory through a focus on what has been neglected or excluded, but traumatic memory poses special problems in this regard. Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton, the series editors, suggest that the question of how we remember has become central to historical enquiry, but that the question itself is fraught with complexity. Generational change and new technologies of memory are reshaping the ways in which memory works, and the influence of trauma narratives is a factor in this. They pose another question: 'What is 'memory' under such conditions?'
Here, we focus on the distance between traumatic narratives in the public domain, and the experience of traumatic recall in the mind of a person who has been directly affected by extreme events. The traumatic flashback, as an eruption of the past into the present that effectively involves a reliving of the original experience, confounds the very definition of memory. From a psychological point of view, it is a bizarre and disruptive phenomenon, a violent experience in and of itself, which cannot be accommodated in the cognitive functioning of the individual. Personal memory implies a connection to personal experience, but public memory does not carry any such implication.
In their introduction to Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places, Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton ask what happens when knowledge relegated to the social margins is suddenly inserted into the public domain (Lehrer and Milton 2011). But if there is 'difficult knowledge' there is perhaps also a form of 'impossible memory,' made so through the gulf between orders of experience, which can also be seen as a gulf between orders of reality (Faye 2003). This is not to argue for some kind of exemption from public recognition of traumatic events and the psychological after-shocks associated with them. The editors of Curating Difficult Knowledge cite the image of German civilians standing by a trench filled with the bodies of concentration camp victims as emblematic of how a reluctant public may be forced to confront horrific realities. Schwartz and Kim, in their introduction to Northeast Asia's Difficult Past: Essays in Collective Memory, stress that 'dangerous memories' may serve to 'call communities to alter ancient evils' (Schwartz and Kim 2010, pp. 1–2). Some collective memories bite deep and painfully, prompting strategies of forgetting that are inversely bound up with public forms of remembrance. These strategies may be intentional and political. In his study of Commemoration and Bloody Sunday, Brian Conway discusses how the emotional legacies of a violently divisive event are manipulated by 'choreographers of memory.' And the success of memory work, he says, 'depends upon its resonance and connection to socio-political institutional contexts' (Conway 2010, pp. 3, 149). Our central concern here is not with the politics of public memory per se, but rather with the relationship—or lack of it—between the experiential memory of traumatic events, and the kinds of narratives and commemorative practices embraced by a wider public.
The essays in this collection are concerned with situations in South-East Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe, Cuba and the United States, but our research originated in a series of meetings held at the University of Southern Queensland in the regional Australian city of Toowoomba. Toowoomba is a place that rarely makes the news, though it did so in spectacular fashion on 10 January 2011, when a powerful flash flood surged along normally sleepy creeks to create an 'inland tsunami' through the central business district. The deluge created a second wave of water that flowed down the 1000-foot escarpment upon which the city rests to inundate the agricultural valley below. The town of Grantham was hit by a wall of water that smashed through houses, carrying heavy vehicles and uprooted trees into a swirling chaos. News coverage was dominated by images of devastation that captured international attention, and local residents began to receive phone calls from distant friends and relatives—some not heard from in years—checking in to make sure they were safe. The 2011 floods shook the local region and too many lives were lost, yet on a global scale it ranked as a minor disaster. In the news cycle, it lasted only as long as the supply of spectacular images. But who is to say that the intensity of the experience for those caught up in this local maelstrom was any less than for those affected by the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami that occurred two months later, or the Pacific Tsunami of 2004, where over 150,000 people lost their lives?
Toowoomba is exposed to trauma in ways that may be typical of any small city in a relatively peaceful and prosperous country. There are 25 war memorials, honoring soldiers lost in conflicts across the twentieth century, from the South African War (1899–1902) to the Gulf War (1990–91); the national veterans' day, Anzac day, is a major event on the civic calendar, as it is in towns and cities throughout Australia. Although most residents have lived their lives at a distance from major conflicts there are four generations of war veterans in the local population and refugee communities from Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Burma. Violent crime strikes closer to home, disrupting the untroubled sense of normality. In April 2013, a coronial inquest was held into the deaths of two young women who were abducted, raped and murdered forty years earlier. Court reporters filed disturbing stories for the national press about 'the city's dark underbelly,' as witnesses revealed how a culture of misogyny and casual brutality thrived in Toowoomba in the early 1970s.
While it is easy to say that the human experiences associated with tyranny and abuse, war and violent crime, disaster and accident 'touch us all,' to use a prevalent cliché, the essays here raise fundamental questions about how traumatic events may register upon a wider public, distanced from them in time and place.
Clinical recognition of a condition known as 'post traumatic stress disorder' (PTSD) has a double-edged effect. While it has led to the provision of urgently needed psychological treatment and support programs for sufferers, it has also led to the privatization of trauma. The term itself is fraught with problems. The condition it describes is characterized precisely by an ongoing relationship to traumatic experience not as 'post' but as current, as something that continues to make itself present in sensory and physiological terms, through the flashback experience. 'Stress' is far too vague a term to describe this kind of recurrent psycho-physiological state of crisis and 'disorder' implies that it is the manifestation of something wrong with the individual, rather than a consequence of something that happened to them. A genuine concern with the impact of traumatic memory must extend beyond the frame of personalised treatment. Our premise is that traumatic events are realities; they happen in the world, not in the fantasy life of individuals or in the narrative frames of our televisions and cinemas.

Public memory and public feeling
The idea of public memory is derived from the work of the early twentieth–century French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, for whom it was associated with group consciousness. Halbwachs established the premise that all memories are inherently social: 'A person remembers only by situating himself within the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents of collective thought' (Halbwachs 1980, p. 33, emphasis added). Public memory emerges when individuals, families and social groups encounter each other in time and space and negotiate a common view of shared events.
There is an important distinction to be made between the collective and the public. Collective memory occurs when individuals separately remember the same event; public memory forms when a people remember in and through inter-subjective relationships with other members of the public. In the view of Edward Casey, this implies an element of embodied demonstration; he suggests that the concept of public memory is distinct from that of social or collective memory in that it occurs in the open, in front of and with others (Casey 2004). According to Casey, collective memory 'allows for co-remembering without co-reminiscing and for the massive convergence of those who remember the same thing without knowing each other personally'. Kendall R. Phillips expresses a similar view of how memories affect and are effected by various publics. To speak of public memory, he says, 'is to speak of a remembrance together as a crucial aspect of our togetherness' (Phillips 2004, p. 10).
The question of what constitutes a public is crucial to these definitions. Jürgen Habermas describes the emergence of a public sphere as a discursive domain of more or less open discussion in which a notionally independent middle class might debate and challenge the various authorities of church and state. The rise of literacy and the development of modern forms of mass communications expanded the means by which this newly enfranchised citizenry might encounter and imagine themselves as a public.
This expansion in scope, though, was marred in practice, according to Habermas, by the increasingly commercial imperative of its key institutions. The commodification of information and representation soon compromised the critical independence necessary to a flourishing liberal democracy (Habermas 1989). This is perhaps why Casey wants to distinguish between the public as a group formed in a social encounter situated in time and space and the collective as a group formed by a mediated form of common address to separated individuals or isolated smaller groups. This collective lacks the means to develop the message amongst themselves. And yet such a distinction seems to lose much of what has come to be invested in the notion of the public.
To speak of a public is to speak of a group who are addressed as such, and whose mental world is organized by shared sources of information. A public memory would then be a memory disseminated—even formed—by these diverse but ultimately compromised sources or institutions and in a suite of 'locations' that might be recognized as constituting various sections of the public sphere or even various public spheres. In a digital age of virtual worlds and instantaneous global communications it seems obsolete to insist on embodied presence for the constitution of a public. Though one takes Casey's and Habermas' point that the powerful modes of interpellation of the modern institutions of the public sphere allow less room for a negotiated bottom-up social response than collective negotiation in a particular time and a shared space. The privatization of the public sphere like the privatization of trauma itself threatens to constrain a liberal exchange amongst the people, which is itself understood as an imperative of personal, social, civic and political hygiene (Habermas 1989).
Habermas' fear of the commercialization of the public sphere is borne out in a global market for news driven by intense competition for the biggest available breaking story. On 23 May 2013, barely twenty four hours after British soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death in broad daylight in a London street, his family were brought out to display their grief before the cameras at a news conference. What justifies such exploitation of people who are still in the process of being assailed by emotions whose full impact has yet to unfold? The practice of asking grieving relatives to speak to the media originated in cases where there might be some advantage to be gained in appealing for information to assist a police enquiry, especially where there was a high level of urgency, involving a search for missing or kidnapped persons. No such advantage was to be gained by putting the distraught family of Lee Rigby on display. Media exposure has become a currency in its own right, with its own circulatory imperatives, and the question of whose interests are really served remains to be addressed.
The media cycle moves with its own seemingly inevitable logic and momentum, carrying us through an event on its own wave of well-worn conventions. In this way Disaster is pre-packaged so that every new instance comes to resemble the one before it and the steps the story has to take to reach its narrative conclusion can be anticipated by everyone. Politicians speaking publicly during disaster events now seem to be reading from an established play-sheet. One of the distinctive features of the devastating Queensland floods of 2011 was the speed at which the memorials went up. The story could only end in memorialization and so the sooner it was memorialized the sooner the community could be encouraged to move on. The memorials themselves became front-page news, their images accompanying editorials that served as conventionalized statements of public grief. The hunger for traumatic events as part of the dramaturgy of life in a media environment carries a demand for direct witness to be rehearsed in public forums. And the principle players in these events must also become public: not just as the focus of publicity, but public in the sense of belonging to the people, so that their trauma is vicariously owned and encompassed in a shared consciousness.
History has its more traditional theatres as well as its archives. For French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, one of the defining attributes of collective memory is that it is accorded the power to place on stage the events of the past, on the occasion of holidays, rites and celebrations (Ricoeur 2004, p. 119). Halbwachs emphasises how commemorative occasions work against the risk of forgetting and promote a sense of the continuity of communal identity through a shared past, but this means that they are also susceptible to cultural and ideological manipulation. Ricoeur, echoing Todorov, expresses concern about 'forced memorization … enlisted in the service of the remembrance of those events that are held to be remarkable, even founding, with respect to common identity' (Ricoeur 2004, p. 85)
Where the events in question are traumatic, their foundational legacy is often associated with cultures of grievance and resentment, and can feed into ethnic or nationalist forms of extremism. One of the triggers for the late twentieth century Yugoslav conflicts was an incendiary speech delivered by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic at Kosovo Polje, the site of the 1389 battle on the Field of the Blackbirds, in which the Serbian army was almost wiped out by invading Ottoman forces. This battle, commemorated in epic poetry and painting, is relived in the national psyche of the Serbian people as an expression of their identity as a nation under perpetual threat of violation, therefore perpetually justified in staging violent counter-active measures.
'There exists no historical community,' says Ricoeur, 'that has not been born out of a relation that can, without hesitation, best be likened to war' (Ricoeur 2004, p. 79) National days of remembrance around the world are testament to this principle, including Anzac Day in Australia, Bastille Day in France, the Day of Ashura in Islamic countries, Patriot Day (on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) in the US and Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust remembrance day) in Israel. Such occasions also testify to what Ricoeur terms 'a certain demand raised by impassioned memories … against the vaster and more critical aim of history' (Ricoeur 2004, p. 89).
In their 2001 study Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age 1870-1930, Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner are concerned about a cultivated obsession with catastrophe, victimization and memorialization. Trauma, they say, 'has become a metaphor for the struggles and challenges of late twentieth century life' (Micale and Lerner 2001, p. 1). Geoffrey Hartman, writing on the Holocaust in public memory, remarks that 'the culture of remembrance is at high tide' (Hartman 2006, p. 1). The memory wave undergoes surges and resurgences that are generated through organized campaigns of commemoration, often associated with changes in the political climate.
During the Toowoomba seminars that were the start of our research into trauma and public memory, we were concerned with what we saw as a polarity on the emotional spectrum, with trauma at one extreme, and sentimentality at the other. Traditions of public memorialisation—narratives, film versions of traumatic events, media reports, built memorials and commemorative events—typically cater to the 'softer' end of the emotional spectrum, with the laying of flowers, singing of anthems and the quiet shedding of tears. They foster admiration for bravery and endurance, and promote narratives of sacrificial heroism, so that the events in question acquire a redemptive aura. Narrative coherence is an important aspect of the public consumption of traumatic events.
Such traditions contrast sharply with the way memory works for individuals who have experienced such events. Traumatic memories are characterised by violent and incoherent sensory replay, often accompanied by a sense of pointlessness that the individual finds overwhelming and disabling. Their onset is sudden and involuntary. While public commemorations may be governed by the resolution 'lest we forget,' those who suffer from traumatic recall may develop vigilant practices to shield against the threat of its return.
In practices of commemoration, public memory is bound up with public feeling in ways that allow for coherent stories to be told and coherent responses to be expressed. There is no place for the panic, anguish and horror that belong to first hand experiences of trauma. Ann Cvetkovich, who convenes a research group on Public Feeling at the University of Texas, describes how the focus of their concern arose from an open meeting on campus following the invasion of Iraq, where 'a dominant response was one of incredulity, a seemingly normalized version of the epistemic shock that is said to accompany trauma' (Cvetkovich 2012, pp. 1–2). Two years later, at a gathering in response to Hurricane Katrina, the urgency of the disaster, she says, created a 'split focus' comparable with the lived realities of class and race division. The split signals different orders of reality, but it may be more radical and, in psychological terms, more technical than is the case with other forms of social division.

Orders of Reality
Commemorative traditions work to intensify a sense of commonality. They are all about association: between the participants, between those assembled in the present and those remembered from the past, between historical causes and the ongoing convictions of a contemporary society. Yet traumatic experience produces states of dissociation. The first psychological studies of trauma in the late nineteenth century arose from observations about the disjointed workings of memory. Trauma from the past refuses to work with and through normalised systems of memory. Freud and Breuer referred to it as 'a foreign body,' operating like an agent provocateur to disturb the whole system (Freud and Breuer 1955, p. 301). Written in 1893, this statement inaugurates a clinical tradition of focusing on trauma as pathological disturbance within the individual.
Current guidelines in clinical diagnosis continue to acknowledge a radical disjunction in the psychology of patients affected by acute traumatic experience. They will typically present with symptoms that include persistent re-experiencing of the trigger event, and persistent avoidance of thoughts, feelings, conversations, activities or sensory stimuli associated with it (American Psychiatric Association 2012). In other words, there is a vigilant practice of defence against and attempted separation from the ordeal of recollection, yet flashback experiences repeatedly break through the barrier. The 2012 revision of the entry for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness acknowledges the work of Freud's contemporary Pierre Janet in pointing to 'a division of the personality or of consciousness': a Dissociative Subtype is now added to the profile, characterised by states of depersonalisation and derealisation, which can include 'out of body' experiences. Freud's term 'double consciousness' may have faded from the clinical vocabulary, but the core elements of late nineteenth century psychological modelling remain in place.
For someone living with the after-effects of traumatic experience, the work of memory is the work of integration, but the problem of dissociation or schism does not only manifest as inner experience. There can be a profound existential isolation that cuts through personal relationships as well as affecting wider social interactions. Australian novelist Alex Miller recalls the impact on his own family:

Towards the end of the war, when my father returned wounded in mind and body, we did not know him. He was changed. …He disappeared into the horror of war for four years and another, crueler man, wearing his tortured mask, returned in his place. (Miller, pp. 34–5)

Aid workers, emergency response specialists, journalists and military personnel are amongst those whose professional commitments mean that they are moving between worlds in which the conditions of normality are poles apart. Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker follows the activities of an American bomb disposal team in Baghdad. It is critically dangerous work, and tension is drawn out second by second in the action scenes as the team leader William James, encased in heavy protective gear, closes in on some lethal device and manually defuses it. In one such scene, the bomb is attached to a man who is begging hysterically for release, but the steel bands around him cannot be cut and James has to back off and watch the explosion of carnage as a helpless bystander. But he copes with this. It is his work and his reality. When the tour of duty ends and James goes home to his wife and baby son, he finds himself in a scenario he can't cope with at all: instructed to find breakfast cereal in the supermarket, he stares down the aisle at the impossible profusion of choices, and is overcome with a crippling sense of disorientation. This second order of reality is one he can no longer inhabit, and he goes back to his work on the front line in Iraq. The emotional split of which Cvetkovich writes opens onto a yawning gulf.
There are degrees of commonality in fellow feeling, and the extremes of the emotional spectrum are not for sharing. If the traumatic experience of the individual must remain a foreign body in the social world, this says something about the limits of community itself. And if, as Halbwachs believes, historical memory serves to promote communal identity through the rehearsal of a shared past, what are the parameters of communal identity? A shared sense of victimhood may serve as a bond, but narratives of victimhood stir up forms of pathos that are incommensurable with the states of cognitive and sensory disorder associated with traumatic experience.
Moving from the social world to the public sphere, the empathic disjunction yawns ever wider. Mass media reportage of natural disasters and other large-scale tragedies can promote the most obtuse forms of popular reaction, as some of our interview subjects attest. In the case of the Lockyer Valley floods, this meant dealing with an avalanche of inappropriate donations, from used mattresses to broken fridges.
Yet in the public sphere, the reverberations of trauma are bound up with live tensions over national security and cultural identity, and may have a disturbing influence in subliminal ways. At this level, the disjunction is not just between the general public and the individuals directly affected; it also operates in the collective consciousness itself so that, as for the individual, the work of memory is bound up with tensions between misaligned planes of awareness.
The argument about a collective form of lack or unconscious displacement in relation to the traumatic impact of past events has some correlation with interpretations that stress denial, though denial may also operate in deliberate, politically motivated ways. When it comes to more direct engagement with the political implications of such events through war crimes tribunals or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the distancing process has a ruthless edge, as Allen Feldman argues in a 2004 essay. Human rights testimony and medicalized talking cures, he writes, 'function as Enlightenment stand-ins, morally polarized to the murky density of embodied suffering' (Feldman 2004, p. 168). Habermas's warning about the distorting effects of commerce in the public sphere has specific application to what has become a thriving trade in books authored by those who can bear first hand witness to horrors around the world. The holocaust has generated a small publishing industry that continues to burgeon, along with a wide ranging trade in what Feldman calls 'biographies and testimonies of political terror' from around the world. Turning the focus on the consuming public, we need to ask about what kinds of interests these are catering to, and where their effect is to assist in healing the dissociative impact of trauma, or how they may be actively contributing to it.
If one of the hallmarks of the post-traumatic condition is an incapacity to integrate extreme experience with normalised patterns of memory, this is surely a pathology that can be applied to the public at large, albeit with effects and implications very different from those confronting an individual. The terrain between the politics and the psychoanalytics of public memory is an interpreter's minefield, but in the most objective terms, there is an undeniable correlation between the history of clinical response to trauma and the most turbulent events of the twentieth century.
At the end of World War I, soldiers returning from the trenches presented symptoms of nervous disorder that were originally described as 'shell-shock.' That term was unsatisfactory in the view of Charles Samuel Myers, a physician who was confronted with the syndrome and began to see it as a form of structural dissociation, triggered when the soldiers tried to return to the mental attitude of civilian life. In other words, the causal factor was not just the experience in the trenches, but that of dealing with different orders of reality. Myers subsequently made his career as a psychologist specialising in trauma and had a strong influence in its identification as a clinical condition.
From a broader cultural point of view, the idea of shell shock blends curiously with the Freudian image of a foreign body in the system. After the war, the shells, exploded or dormant, remained on foreign soil, but the shock was brought home to Britain and America, where new theories of traumatic pathology were being generated, with the effect of cordoning off this reverberating aftermath of the horrors. They focused not on the challenge of bridging different orders of reality and experience, but on diagnosis and treatment of a condition seen as a 'disorder.' Traumatic experience was being privatised, made the property of individuals who suffered its after-effects.
Clinical studies of psychological trauma intensified following World War II. The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, produced in 1952, included a syndrome known as 'gross stress reaction,' described as a response to the exceptional physical or mental stresses of war and other catastrophic situations. Another surge in cases was seen in soldiers returned from Vietnam. The term 'post traumatic stress disorder' (PTSD) entered the clinical vocabulary in 1980, and four years later the US Congress passed the mandate for a National Centre for PTSD, to be established in Association with Veterans Affairs. The struggle for medical recognition of the condition was as much a political as a medical and sociological campaign.
In public as in personal memory, traumatic events threaten to destabilize a whole apparatus of cognitive management, but the history of treating traumatic memory as a personal matter has major cultural consequences. One of these is the sidestepping of public responsibility for coming to terms with a past that includes episodes of horror and devastation. There is a sense, then, in which the key steps in the clinical history mark a cultural as well as an individual pathology, and the dissociative disorder is something manifested in the public at large, who invest in forms of memory that insulate them from the sensory and cognitive turbulence suffered by those who have been direct witnesses to the scenes of horror. Michael S. Roth, author of a significant recent study of the relationship between memory, trauma and history, also sees the parallel between a split or dissociation in workings of historical memory, and the psychological split that manifests in the patient suffering flashbacks. The traumatic event, says Roth, 'seems to defy the meaning-making activity at the core of both the psychoanalytic and historical enterprise' (Roth 2012, p. xviii).
This is a significant insight, with regard to the operations of public memory, and Roth's observation that such events have a magnetic appeal, yet resist representation is worth testing. Certainly there is a long tradition of converting the horrors of war into adventure narratives that give very little consideration to the psychological impact of real violence, but in cinema there has also been a counter-movement to expose audiences to the turbulence, disorientation and sheer absurdity of the combat zone. Perhaps this is where some of the bridging work may take place. After watching Apocalypse Now, Jarhead, The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan, audiences may genuinely have a better understanding of what it means to carry the burden of traumatic recollection. Yet the viewing experience is also about other things, which serve to distance and distract from or temper the impact of the most confronting elements. Saving Private Ryan, whose opening sequences present some of the most graphically realistic battle scenes in contemporary cinema, moves on to interweave the wartime scenario with the sentimental narrative of the bid to get Private Ryan safely back home to his family. What the future may be like for those who do make it home is a question that remains unexplored.
World Memory: Personal trajectories in Global Time, an anthology of essays by Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, offers some valuable analysis of how traumatic memory challenges the boundaries of communication, generating vernacular and aesthetic languages that disrupt conventional narrative and linguistic modes of remembrance. Some of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century were clearly driven by a compulsion to find the means of giving expression to extreme states of mental and emotional disturbance associated with large-scale traumatic disturbance in the external world. The defining image of Expressionism is Edward Munch's The Scream (Der Schrie der Natur) originally created as a pastel drawing in 1895, and twice reworked as a painting, in 1903 and 1905. Reproductions are often featured on websites about post-traumatic stress disorder, so that it has become an icon of the condition. On a bridge in the midst of deserted landscape, an isolated figure stands, pale face distorted in horror, head clasped between the hands as if to keep it from exploding, while the sheer force of the inner experience sends shock waves through the surrounding earth and sky. By Munch's own account, the impulse for the painting was an anxiety attack with visionary dimensions:

I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (Munch 2005, p. 82)

Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern department, where the work was auctioned for a record sum in 2012, describes the image as 'one of the visual keys for modern consciousness.' (qtd in Michel 2012).
If the figure at the centre of the scene is an emblem of modern consciousness, this would suggest that an experience of traumatic anxiety is some kind of common touchstone, but the figure at the centre of the scene expresses intense isolation, and his two companions are passing out of the frame.

Memory in Crisis
Human kind, as T. S. Eliot wrote in 1936, cannot bear very much reality (Eliot 1971, p. 14, lines 42–3). What is held in common is rather something generally termed 'normality,' a state that excludes the extreme and the exceptional, and presumes a certain level of order. In one of our interviews, emergency nurse Therese Lee recalls a briefing session in which disaster relief workers headed for Banda Aceh were advised of the need to understand 'how abnormal their normal is.' Yet most of us persist in the assumption that disorder is abnormal, and this applies to psychiatric conditions as well as the conditions of civilian life. Traumatic experience confounds any presumed correlation between reality and normality, threatening to expose us to the realization that what we call normality is a consensual delusion.
Common sense would suggest that the orientations of human memory are to the exceptional rather than the run of the mill events in our lives, and this also applies to public memory, but when it comes to recollection of extreme events, we encounter a paradox. While traumatic experience compels recollection, and with such insistence that a form of hyper-memory takes over with a dynamic of its own in defiance of any conscious control, in many ways traumatic recall does not behave like memory at all. A study of how traumatic experience is and is not accommodated in public memory raises issues that go to the heart of a phenomenology of memory and tests the defining properties of memory itself.
Ricoeur's work Memory, History, Forgetting, offers a comprehensive account of these properties as they have been identified in the European philosophical tradition. 'All memory is of the past,' a maxim Ricoeur quotes from Aristotle, serves as the lodestar for his exploration (Ricoeur 2004, p. 6. To this we can add Augustine's view that 'it is to memory that the sense of orientation in the passage of time is linked.' (Ricoeur 2004, p. 97) A sense of temporality, or the passage of time, is central to the structure of human consciousness, and modes of tracking and measuring time underpin all our communications about events in the world. History is concerned with their relative distance or closeness on a strictly chronological spectrum, while in public memory, some events have greater emotional immediacy than others because of the ways in which they resonate with contemporary circumstances.
In the case of traumatic memory, the consciousness of the individual is at the mercy of an intolerable form of immediacy. The past is recalled to the present with an urgency that violates temporality as a structuring principle of mental and emotional life. The event is re-experienced as a sensory, physiological and mental emergency. In a recent book on coping with trauma, Jon G. Allen writes of the '90/10' syndrome: 90% of the emotion is coming from the past, and 10% from the present. Another way of expressing this is that the experiential distinction between past and present is ruptured (Allen xxxxx).
This signals other forms of rupture in human cognition. Ricoeur's phenomenology of memory assumes a fundamental cognitive control. He discusses Aristotle's distinction between memory (mnēmē) as a spontaneous arising and the act of recollection (anamnēsis), which involves conscious work against forgetting and 'the conquest of temporal distance. Mnēmē is driven by pathos; what arises is some kind of feeling, that carries with it an aura of times past. (Ricoeur, pp. 24–6) For the modern philosopher, this inevitably calls up Proust, and the euphoria, melancholia and sensory immersions of his turn of the century novel, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time.) Ricoeur does acknowledge the phenomenon of 'obsessional eruptions' that are suffered rather than simply experienced. They are forms of 'wounded or sick memory,' and here he acknowledges that 'one can wonder to what extent a pathology of memory, and so the treatment of memory as pathos, fits into the exercise of memory' (Ricoeur, p. 69)
One can also reverse the speculation: if a theory of memory cannot take account of the phenomenon of traumatic recall, either the theory itself is flawed or traumatic recall is something quite other than what we generally call 'memory.' If according to Aristotle, 'the primary distinction is between laborious recollection and spontaneous recollection' the sheer force of traumatic affect railroads both sides of the equation. It operates not in accordance with mental effort but in spite of it. All the effort goes into avoidance of the replay, which is driven by a complex fusion of sensory activity, nervous reaction and emotional distress. Such experiences also produce cognitive dissociation.
Classical accounts of memory, and Augustine's in particular, tend to characterize it as a repository that underpins the cohesiveness of human understanding, a consistent sense of self, and a sense of stability and security in the world. It is 'a vast, immeasurable sanctuary' and a storehouse from which he can draw at will on the riches of past experience and accumulated knowledge. (Ricoeur, p. 98). The passions are muted or screened. Former joys and sadnesses are recollected, but at one remove from one's present emotional state.
Set against this is all the turbulence and distress of the flashback experience, in which physiological processes take over in defiance of mental control. The body re-enacts a state of terror and the sensory nervous system is in chaos, with manifestations that may include sweating, palpitation, tremor, nausea, vertigo, choking, paralysis and hallucination. But the hallucinations—auditory, visual, olfactory—are not simply delusional. They belong to an acute sense of actuality that has fallen outside the time-scheme of a shared world.
If traumatic recall tests the definition of memory, it is also a challenge to how we think about the relationship between remembering and knowing. Revisiting Descartes's Second Meditation, Ricoeur notes that 'the cogito is not a person defined by his or her memory and the capacity to give an accounting to himself. It bursts forth in the lightning flash of an instant … the cogito does not possess duration' (Ricoeur, p. 103) If the cogito is more akin to a revelation or recognition than to a discursive construction of the world, it may be more closely related to involuntary flashbacks than to processes of conscious recollection.
This brings us to an important point, and perhaps one that should not need stating. Traumatic flashbacks may be an affliction, but they are not delusional in the sense of belonging to some kind of false consciousness or belief system. They may be a form of disorder in the individual, but their origin lies in a form of turbulence that has occurred in the world. Besides being aspects of the individual's inner experience, flashbacks are also forms of witnessing that demand to be reckoned with in the wider social environment.
Modernity disciplines our societies and specializes our knowledge and so our response to trauma can take the form of a sentence, an assessment or a diagnosis that whisks the experience away from our social encounters and sequesters it as an object of specialized attention. A return to the mode of address that is implicit in Munch's painting invites a different approach. For the scream has a face, and that face addresses those of us who stand outside the frame. The painting does not address us as the figures in the background who seem entirely uninvolved. It catches us—pins us—in an act of recognition that compels witness. If traumatic experience cannot be made public then how are we to bear witness to the trauma of others? Through a tradition of clinical practice focused on the challenge of overcoming a personalised 'disorder' we are effectively privatising trauma, especially in situations where those who have been through it are relocated to societies and communities that have not been subject to the levels of distress and chaos brought about by violent events.
This is not to say that we can simply shift the emphasis away from the pathological aspects of post-traumatic distress. Bruce Shapiro, Director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, insists on the fundamental fact that people sustain psychological injury as a result of exposure to trauma, and compares the psychic aftershocks to those that follow an earthquake. These, he says, manifest themselves in ways that are 'deeply personal' (Shapiro 2010). Neurobiologists have now identified that there is specific damage to brain function, including shrinkage of the hippocampus leading to impaired memory processing and difficulty in placing memories within a time frame (Blum 2003, p. 428).
Since Freud and Breuer began their work on hysteria in the 1890s, the association between traumatic experience and a range of symptoms signalling serious psychological disturbance has been vital to an effective clinical response. Sleeplessness, social disorientation, anxiety attacks and recurrent flashback experiences are afflictions requiring personalised forms of support and treatment. But Freud and Breuer also introduced some problematic assumptions to the treatment process, prominent amongst them being a view of human memory as untrustworthy, and especially so in cases where symptoms of hysteria or neurosis are present. Notions of false or repressed memory risk undermining the trauma survivor's position as a witness to objective realities whose public validation is of the most urgent importance. The distinguished German psychoanalyst, Werner Bohleber, warns that psychoanalysis 'is in danger of becoming a treatment technique that actually fades out history' through a focus on memories in isolation from any concern for the context of their emergence, so that the past loses any autonomous meaning (Bohleber 2007, p. 88).

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General Editors' statement, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies.