Trauma Time

Konstanz Graduate Workshop/14-05-2014/Maria Roca Lizarazu Trauma Time The relationship between time and trauma might best be described in terms of extreme fragmentation,1 disarrangement and the dissolution of temporal boundaries. The experience of trauma disrupts our common, linear understanding of time and creates an uncomfortable rapport between the past, the present and the future. This becomes particularly apparent when looking at Sigmund Freud’s highly complicated concept of Nachträglichkeit,2 whose implications for our understanding of temporality and the relationship between cause and effect I will try to investigate in this talk. If there exists such a thing as “trauma time” Nachträglichkeit is probably the right word to describe it. I am far from being an expert on either Freudian psychoanalysis or the notion of Nachträglichkeit, which is extremely hard to grasp, partly because Freud never gave an official definition of the term. Rather, the concept permeates and undergirds his entire work, from the very early Entwurf einer Psychologie (1895) to the famous Wolfman case (Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose, 1914) right up to his last monumental essay on Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1939). Generally, one can say that the concept involves two temporal dimensions, which become obvious when looking at the French and English translations of Freud’s term: 3 there is “deferred action” on the one hand, and on the other, there is “après-coup” or “afterwardsness”. The meaning that intuitively springs to mind when thinking of the German word “nachträglich” is that of “deferred action” or latency. This understanding of Nachträglichkeit is closely tied to the early days of psychoanalytical trauma theory and to a condition that became known as “railway spine”. 4 In Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion Freud himself offers the following description of this particular phenomenon: 1 My understanding of trauma is based on Slavoj Žižek’s definition of trauma as “the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready for, something the subject cannot integrate in any way.” See Žižek, Slavoj: Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject, in: Filozofski vestnik XXIX.2 (2008), p. 10. Žižek’s defintion remains indebted to a strongly event-based understanding of trauma, which has dominated Western discourse since the 19th century. In recent years, there has been a growing criticism of this rather one-sided notion of trauma, since it fails to integrate instances of structural trauma such as capitalist exploitation, life in war zones or the effects of climate change. For such a criticism see Rothberg, Michael: Preface. Beyond Tancred and Chlorinda – trauma studies for implicated subjects, in: Buelens, Gert/Sam Durrant/Robert Eaglestone (Eds.): The Future of Trauma Theory. Routledge 2014, pp. xi-xviii as well as Craps, Stef: Beyond Eurocentricism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age, in: Buelens, Gert/Sam Durrant/Robert Eaglestone (Eds.): The Future of Trauma Theory, pp. 45-61. 2 A very short but also very accurate approach towards Nachträglichkeit can be found in Jean Laplanche’s and JeanBertrand Pontalis’ Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse, see. Laplanche, Jean/Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt am Main 1973, pp. 313-317. A more extensive treatment of the term is provided by Friedrich-Wilhelm Eickhoff, see Eickhoff, Friedrich-Wilhelm: On Nachträglichkeit: The Modernity of an Old Concept, in: The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87. 6 (2008), pp. 1453-1469. 3 These are mentioned by Eickhoff, see Eickhoff, Friedrich-Wilhelm: On Nachträglichkeit, p. 1353f. 4 For a more detailed description of the genesis of psychoanalytical trauma theory and its connection to “railway spine”, see: Luckhurst, Roger: The Trauma Question. London/New York 2008, pp. 20ff.

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Konstanz Graduate Workshop/14-05-2014/Maria Roca Lizarazu Es ereignet sich, daß ein Mensch scheinbar unbeschädigt die Stätte verlässt, an der er einen schreckhaften Unfall, z.B. einen Eisenbahnzusammenstoß, erlebt hat. Im Laufe der nächsten Wochen entwickelt er aber eine Reihe schwerer psychischer und motorischer Symptome, die man nur von seinem Schock, jener Erschütterung oder was sonst damals gewirkt hat, ableiten kann.5

The time that passes between the actual violent event and the onset of the symptoms is characterised by Freud as “Inkubationszeit” or a latency period.6 Freud’s account thus suggests that the effects of a trauma cannot be experienced directly, but only belatedly – nachträglich – after a certain amount of time has elapsed. In the course of his essay, Freud remarkably links this notion of Nachträglichkeit not so much to individual experiences of extreme violence (as one might expect from the above mentioned quote), but to the collective encounter with trauma: he famously claims that the emergence of Jewish monotheism was actually a reaction to the collective murder of the “Urvater” Moses and the subsequent return of this repressed crime. This raises the question whether collective historical traumas – such as, for example, the Holocaust – always have to go through a latency phase before they can be experienced, confronted and – in the best case – worked through. When it comes to the issue of temporality, this definition of Nachträglichkeit implies that the line between past and present is blurred: it confronts the subject or the collective with a past that will not pass, and which extends and intrudes into the present in unexpected and disruptive ways. Ultimately, this dissolution of boundaries does not only affect the capacities for dealing with the present, but also the possibilities for building a future, which, as some might argue, relies on the ability to “let things go”, to use a rather worn-out phrase, which, nonetheless, still sounds much better than the highly problematic rhetoric of the “Schlussstrich”. However, even though this understanding of Nachträglichkeit disrupts the flow of time, it still follows a linear narrative, featuring an original traumatic event and its ensuing effect, which might develop belatedly, but still comes after and as a result of the original event. This is very different with the second aspect of Freud’s concept which is even harder to approach because it is linked to the idea of retroactivity. What Freud means by this is probably best illustrated through a reading of the Emma case from the 1895 Entwurf einer Psychologie. The case deals with a patient named Emma who is under the constraints of a “hysterische[r] Zwang”, 7 as Freud puts it, 5 Freud, Sigmund: Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, in: Ders.: Gesammelte Werke. Chronologisch geordnet. Vol. XVI: Werke aus den Jahren 1932-1939. Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 171. 6 Ibid., p. 171. 7 Freud, Sigmund: Entwurf einer Psychologie, in: Ibid.: Gesammelte Werke. Nachtragsband. Texte aus den Jahren 1885-1938. Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 438.

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Konstanz Graduate Workshop/14-05-2014/Maria Roca Lizarazu which keeps her from entering shops on her own. Emma herself traces this behaviour back to a memory from the time when she was 12 years old: “Sie ging in einen Laden etwas einkaufen, sah die beiden Kommis, von denen ihr einer in Erinnerung ist, miteinander lachen, und lief in irgendwelchem Schreckaffekt davon. Dazu lassen sich Gedanken erwecken, daß die beiden über ihr Kleid gelacht und daß ihr einer sexuell gefallen habe.” 8 As Freud points out, Emma’s memory does not explain the specific form of force of her “Zwang”, which is why he suspects that the root of her problem must be an altogether different one. And indeed, over the course of the psychoanalytic cure a second memory resurfaces, that dates back to the time when she was eight years old: Als Kind von acht Jahren ging sie zweimal in den Laden eines Greißlers allein, um Naschereien einzukaufen. Der Edle kniff sie dabei durch die Kleider in die Genitalien. Trotz der ersten Erfahrung ging sie ein zweites Mal hin. Nach dem zweiten blieb sie aus. Sie macht sich nun Vorwürfe, daß sie zum zweiten Mal hingegangen, als ob sie damit das Attentat hätte provizieren wollen. Tatsächlich ist ein Zustand des ‘drückenden bösen Gewissens’ auf dies Erlebnis zurückzuführen.9

Proceeding from this second discovery, Freud offers the following explanation for the genesis of the “Zwang” and indeed the trauma: “Wir verstehen nun Szene I (Kommis), wenn wir Szene II (Greißler) dazunehmen. Wir brauchen nur eine assoziative Verbindung zwischen beiden. Sie gibt selbst an, diese sei durch das Lachen gegeben. Das Lachen der Kommis habe sie an das Grinsen erinnert, mit dem der Greißler sein Attentat begleitet [hatte]. Nun läßt sich der Vorgang wie folgt illustrieren: Im Laden lachen die beiden Kommis, dies Lachen ruft (unbewußt) die Erinnerung an den Greißler wach. Die Situation hat ja noch eine Ähnlichkeit, sie ist wieder im Laden allein. Mit dem Greißler wird der Kniff durch die Kleider erinnert, sie ist aber seitdem pubes geworden. Die Erinnerung erweckt, was sie damals gewiß nicht konnte [my emphasis, MRL], eine sexuelle Entbindung, die sich in Angst umsetzt.10

So how does this exemplify the logic of Nachträglichkeit? In order to understand this, it is important to note that the traumatic affect was not attached to the original sexual assault: according to Freud, the eight-year old Emma did not understand the Greißler’s sexual aggression and therefore, one could claim, that she did not understand the event at all. On the level of psychic reality, the first scene did thus not happen, in the sense that it was not experienced or consciously registered in the psyche. It was only reactivated (or indeed created) through the second later scene, which gave way to an understanding of the first scene’s sexual content and thus endowed it with a traumatic quality. This means that, in Freud’s opinion, the first scene was not traumatic in itself, but only turned into a trauma afterwards or nachträglich: “Überall findet sich, daß eine Erinnerung 8 Ibid., p. 445. 9 Ibid., p. 445. 10 Ibid., p. 445f.

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Konstanz Graduate Workshop/14-05-2014/Maria Roca Lizarazu verdrängt wird, die nur nachträglich zum Trauma geworden ist.”11 This leads to various conclusions: First of all, it seems that it is not so much the event itself which has a traumatising quality, but the memory of the incident or rather: the meaning that the incident gains through the interplay of memory, affect and event: “Es liegt hier ein Fall vor, daß eine Erinnerung einen Affekt erweckt, den sie als Erlebnis nicht erweckt hatte, weil unterdes die Veränderung der Pubertät ein anderes Verständnis des Erinnerten ermöglicht hat.” 12 Interestingly, it is therefore not the “initial absence of signification” that leads to traumatic pathology, but, on the contrary, “it is the belated understanding that initiates traumatic symptomatology.”13 This absolutely goes against poststructuralist understandings of trauma, as put forward by Cathy Caruth, which posit that it is exactly the incomprehensibility and unclaimability of an experience that makes it traumatic.14 Secondly, this understanding of Nachträglichkeit inextricably links trauma to the psychological organisation of the subject – external traumas owe “their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing ‘psychic reality’”, as Slavoj Žižek has put it. 15 This observation is also at odds with a Caruthian understanding of trauma, where the traumatic effect is based solely on the suddenness and violence of the external event.16 Thirdly, the retroactive force of Nachträglichkeit reverses the arrow of time and the relationship between cause and effect. When reading the Emma case, one gets the impression that the “original” trauma (scene I) does not lie buried in the past, where it is rediscovered through the later event or memory (scene II). Instead, it is only through the later event that the “original” trauma is actually brought into existence: we are thus confronted with the paradoxical situation that the effect actually precedes and determines the cause. There is no trauma prior to scene II, however, its effects are already there. This leads to the conclusion that, in the Emma case, trauma is actually “placeless”, 17 in the sense that it does not have a distinct point of origin. This placelessness of trauma ultimately complicates the ontological status of the “original” 11 Ibid., p. 448. 12 Ibid., p. 447. 13 Bistoen, Gregory/Stijn Vanheule/Stef Craps: Nachträglichkeit: A Freudian Perspective on Delayed Traumatic Reactions, in: Theory and Psychology (forthcoming), p. 9. 14 See for example Caruth, Cathy: Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore London 1996. 15 Žižek, Slavoj: Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject, p. 10. 16 Interestingly, this contrast between Žižek' and Caruth's positions ultimately points back to what Ruth Leys has identified as the mimemtic-antimemetic scheme that has shaped the Western discourse in trauma from the beginning. See Leys, Ruth: Trauma. A Genealogy. Chicago London 2000. 17 “Freud postulated that for traumatic events stemming from childhood, what is repeated is something which never took place as such because it lacked the sense that an adult perspective would supply. What took place did not happen then (it was lived through but not ‘experienced’). It is only as memory that it becomes affective, but this does not mean that the trauma has happened now. This would be to impute to trauma the status of both origin and outcome. The peculiarity of this type of trauma is that it is placeless.” See Mather, Ronald/Jill Marsden: Trauma and Temporality. On the Origins of Post-Traumatic Stress, in: Theory and Psychology 14.2 (2004), p. 212.

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Konstanz Graduate Workshop/14-05-2014/Maria Roca Lizarazu traumatic event. Put differently: the creative force of Nachträglichkeit makes us wonder whether the trauma actually took place in historical reality. This vexing problem is probably the main concern of the Wolfman case, which anxiously circles around the question whether what Freud identifies as the “Urszene” - i.e. the sight of the parents having sexual intercourse a tergo – took place in historical reality: “[...] kein Zweifel hat mich mehr in Anspruch genommen, keine andere Unsicherkeit entschiedener von Publikationen zurückgehalten.”18 Whereas, at the start of the text, Freud seems utterly convinced that what he discovered during the psychoanalytic cure was a real event, he gradually takes back this verdict. For instance, he admits that the “Urszene” might not have happened exactly as it was recalled by the patient, but probably in the form of a melange between several events, “aus zwei Bestandteilen, einem früheren indifferenten und einem späteren, höchst eindrucksvollen, zusammengekleistert”.19 He eventually puts the word “Urszene” into quotation marks, which serve as visual markers of its precarious and undecided ontological status. Ultimately, Freud states that it does not matter whether the scene actually took place or not, since its traumatic effects have profoundly shaped the life of his patient. However, the historical reality of such a traumatic event does matter when trauma is regarded as a medico-legal problem, i.e. when compensation is claimed on the basis of a cause-and-effect-relationship between a violent event an its psychological consequences. As Roger Luckhurst has pointed out, the debate over the causal relationship between an external event and its psychological outcome has haunted the medical, legal and psychological discourse on trauma since the 19th century.20 Finally, there remains one important concern that is not raised in Freud’s text: the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit and trauma seems firmly entangled in an event-based understanding of traumatic incidents and in individual psychopathology. Whether it is a single traumatogenic event or a chain of events that operates in a forward or reverse direction, the concept of Nachträglichkeit apparently supposes that traumatic experiences are discrete events, which are the exception and not the rule in an individual’s life. This raises the question whether the notion of Nachträglichkeit can at all be applied to instances of structural violence and trauma, such as the capitalist exploitation in sweat shops and copper mines, life in war zones or the experience of constant oppression and repeated abuse, as Slavoj Žižek, has pointed out: While for us, in the developed West, trauma is as a rule experienced as a momentary intrusion 18 Freud, Sigmund: Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose, in: Ibid.: Gesammelte Werke. Chronologisch geordnet. Vol. XII: Werke aus den Jahren 1917-1920. Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 137 Fn. 19 Ibid., p. 88. 20 See Luckhurst, Roger: The Trauma Question.

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Konstanz Graduate Workshop/14-05-2014/Maria Roca Lizarazu which violently disturbs our normal daily life (a terrorist attack, being mugged or raped, suffering an earthquake or tornado…), what about those for whom trauma is a permanent state of things, a way of life, say, those in a war torn country like Sudan or Kongo? Those who have nowhere to retreat from their traumatic experience, so that they cannot even claim that, long after the trauma hit, they were haunted by its spectre: what remains is not the trauma’s spectre, but the trauma itself?21

21 Žižek, Slavoj: Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject, p. 11.

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