“The knowledge of trauma is fiercely defended against, for it can be a momentous, threatening, cognitive and affective task, involving an unjaundiced appraisal of events and our own injuries, failures, conflicts, and losses….To protect ourselves from affect we must, at times, avoid knowledge….Situations of horror destroy the detached sensibility necessary for articulation, analysis, elaboration….Knowing…requires a capacity for metaphor which cannot withstand atrocity….Notwithstanding the difficulties around and the struggle against knowing, the reality of traumatic events is so compelling that knowledge prevails, despite its absence to consciousness and its incompleteness….The different forms of remembering trauma range from not knowing, fugue states, fragments, transference phenomena, overpowering narratives, life themes, witnessed narratives, metaphors….These vary in degree of encapsulation versus integration of the experience and in degree of ownership of the memory, i.e., the degree to which an experiencing ‘I’ is present as subject….Erecting barriers against knowing is often the first response to such trauma. Women in Nazi concentration camps dealt with difficult interrogation by the Gestapo by derealization, by asserting ‘I did not go through it. Somebody else went through the experience.’ A case study example is included of a man in therapy who wanted to capture an elusive memory. The only remaining trace was a sense of dread on hearing the phone click. Over time, he recollected a traumatic wartime experience as a child involving the death of a doctor whom he had loved, and for which he felt partly responsible. Having recovered the memory he had lost, its intrusive fragments no longer blocked him from pursuing his life. Many of his somatic symptoms receded at the time….Unintegrable memories endure as a split-off part, a cleavage in the ego….When the balance is such that the ego cannot deal with the experience, fragmentation occurs….Simply put, therapy with those impacted by trauma involves, in part, the reinstatement of the relationship between event, memory and personality.”
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 03:33:30 +0000
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